We will obviously take a slightly different route with this one considering the date. Every year when this comes around I always think back to that day. I can see it as if it were yesterday, where I was, what I was doing, all of it. The thing that stands out the most is my drive into the office (side note; I felt like it was wrong for me to go on with my normal work day). Anyway, I glanced at my speed, I was doing 50 mph, on the freeway, in the left lane, during rush hour and so was everyone else. We were all driving in a fog. I have never agreed that tragic events should be marked each year as an "anniversary". Today marks 14 years since our nations biggest terrorist tragedy occurred. I think you guys get the jist of the focus, at least for the first page or two. It's the least we can do. Edit: Today is Patriot Day in the US.
It is hard for me to realize that my twin boys were all of 4 when that day happened. I remember looking at them and wondering how this event was going to affect them for the rest of their lives. I really feel for all of you who will never know the joy of just showing up for a flight 15 minutes before it is scheduled to leave and just walk onto the plane. To go to a professional sports game without being searched. Just to not have a general paranoid feeling that people are just waiting for the next attack. Now with them being all of 18, I wonder if they will ever just get a job.
I was working on building out the online banking system for a bank that had a big office in one of the towers, and just like that 8 key team members were removed from the project. It was surreal, and very, very weird and difficult to carry on with the job. Their names were everywhere, and it was a weird mix of not talking about it while referring to their work or part in the process. It never really sorted itself out fully, and I was very happy when that job was done and we could move on to something else.
I lost a couple of high school friends that day. I remember just kind of going through my day in a haze, not really grasping the sheer magnitude of what was happening.
I was in junior high at the time. We didn't have class the rest of the day. We just went to a different room to watch the news with a different teacher every 50 minutes. My school was hosting a cross country meet that day, and only one other team showed up. It was kind of surreal going through the motions of a race with hardly anyone else on the course.
I was in bed and my dad called me and said, "a plane just hit a building in New York". I was still groggy due to the 3 hour time difference, and was thinking "Cessna 172 hit a 4-storey walk-up, what's the big deal?". The entire day was just one "holy shit" after another.
My dad's 82nd birthday today. Go Dad! I remember on this morning in 2001, everyone I worked with was convinced that it was the work of Sadaam Hussein, and I immediately called bullshit on that. The events of that day were terrible, not just because of the lives lost, but because of all the freedoms and privacy that were stolen from us by our own government in the name of "security."
I was playing in a charity golf tournament for a local hospital in Waterbury, Ct with my father and a couple of good friends. It was a shot gun tourney and we teed off on 16, when we got to the first hole we where told a plane had hit one of the towers - we all thought the same thing as Nett, a Cessna hit the building how bad could it possibly be? By the time we got to the 4th hole where there is a snack shack there was a television on. We stood and watched the live footage of Tower One go down. My father was the CFO of a major New England bank at the time and did a lot of investment business with all the major players at Cantor Fitzgerald. As the tower went down all he could say was I just watched many, many people I know and am friends with die. I will never forget the look on his face. Because the tourney was a fund raiser for a hospital, the afternoon flight was cancelled and all of the Docs and nurses that would have participated waited around the club house on standby not knowing if they would be called into the local hospital for additional support or called into the City for the same reason. It was completely surreal...
I was in High School when this happened and they let us go home early. My friends and I then went binge drinking for the day. I am horribly embarrassed by this. At the time I didn't understand the gravity of the situation. If this happened now I would probably hide in my bathroom and cry for hours. RIP
I will say that travelling a week later to San Francisco was surreal... the flight was almost empty, and hotels near the airport were giving rooms up for $25 a night. Not a rental car or highway-adjacent motel room available anywhere.
I was unloading a semi at work when the driver made a comment about us being under attack from "someone". As soon as I finished I ran into the office and turned on the TV while my dad and brother looked at me like I was crazy. I got it turned on just in time to see the second plane hit. Much like most of you said, I was in a fog the rest of the day/night. I didn't know whether to cry/be angry/be very afraid and eventually made it through all of those. Just looking back on it brings back some of the same emotions and fears as many of us felt that day.
The UPS guy came into the office where I worked at time and said the same thing, and I thought the exact same thing. I pulled up the AOL main page where they have the little news blurbs, and there was a picture of the first tower with smoke coming out. Everybody in the office immediately went to the conference room and huddled around the TV for the next couple hours, watching all the "holy shit" stuff unfold. It was very bizarre. I went to the Red Cross the next morning to give blood, and the line was around the block. There were a couple staffers milling about, and the told the last half of the line, "come back over the next couple days, we'll still need it." I mentioned that it was odd, because since I'm O-, they usually want mine. One lady said, you're O-, well come on up here to the front of the line. I also remember that for about a week, everywhere you walked, people just being more friendly to each other. It was nice. My parents had a trip to Europe planned departing on Sept 18. They decided to go, and I tracked their plane on Flight Aware off and on.
I remember waking up in Bethel, AK, and walking out to the living room where my dad was sitting, in his boxers on the couch, holding his coffee, listening to the radio reports. I remember the fall was hitting peak colors, and the rising sun made the tundra look like it was on fire. No one at school seemed to interested, until someone said their uncle had been flying back from a moose hunt and been intercepted by military jets(All flights were grounded, even bush-AK). One of my mom's friend had a father, who was in the twin towers, and WALKED DOWN almost 60 flights of steps, through smoke, and out to safety. unreal.
I was in 7th grade biology class and after the first plane hit, we basically spent the rest of the day just watching the day unfold on TVs in the classrooms. Then I remember my mom coming home from work and just weeping as we watched the news. At first it was hard to grasp the gravity of what had happened and it took awhile for it to really sink in. My girlfriend's dad was an air traffic control manager at the time and can't image what it would have been like in the radar control room as the FAA basically shut down airspace in an instant over the US when it happened.
It seems more surreal as time goes on. I see the pictures and videos, and almost don't believe that it actually happened. I was 14 when it did, so I had no understanding of global anything, didn't know what the WTC was, etc. But watching the news and fallout in the following weeks catapulted me into a more adult mindset of truly realizing there is evil in the world. Up until then I kind of thought war and horror like that was a thing of the past, and then as of September 12, 2001, I began to notice the real world outside of my happy childhood bubble. Still, more so than ever, God bless the good in the world. Even with 9/11 and all the other equally horrible things that happen all the time, it makes me so fucking proud to be a human when I see good people doing kind things. Well fuck, I didn't expect to start tearing up when I clicked the WDT... But that's ok. Much love, idiots.