What were you doing?

[Ayaan]

I was at work. My boss came in telling us that he'd just heard on the radio about a plane hitting one of the WTC towers. Immediately, I thought it was some small 'puddle jumper' had been involved. I turned on the radio and we started hearing about the rest of it. By the time I left work to head home (I worked the night shift), all planes were being ordered to land to the nearest airport. I was home watching the live coverage when the towers collapsed. It all seemed surreal. However, in the following days, I was able to lose myself in work. At the time I worked in a blood bank and we were swamped with donors - people really didn't know what else to do.

[Schneibster]

Worth saying it again for a second thread, I suppose.

I was asleep, and my wife woke me up and said I should probably know about "this." While I was drinking my coffee, the first one collapsed.

[Hermit]

I woke up some time after midnight. Unable to go back to sleep, I turned the television on. The first thing I saw was a long shot: cityscape, helicopters flying about and a column of smoke. It looked like a really bad disaster movie of the type that were so popular in the seventies. Changing channels, I saw the same thing. Every channel was showing the same movie! Then it dawned on me: this is not a movie.

By the time I finally grasped the scale of the disaster I got really angry. If freedom fighters can wipe several thousand Americans out, why can't they get them all? Incompetents! Everybody knows that 300 million fathers, mothers and children trying to eke out a living and hoping not to have too miserable life are pure evil. Every one of them. Their murderous government, after all, represents the lot of them. Here the freedom fighters demonstrate that they can do it, and then fail to finish the job. They must have gone soft, enjoying all the liberties and enlightened governance in their respective home countries

[irretating]

^ yeah I thought that, too

[Audley Strange]

I was in bed, The Good Lady Strange called me to tell me there had been a bomb at the Pentagon. I turned on the news just as the reports came in of the first plane hitting the towers. The second plane hit, I said "no fucking way" about 30 times and then friends and family started to call me to ask who I thought was responsible for some reason, like I had the inside scoop. By about 6 O'clock I was sick of hearing about it.

That's not changed.

[Lozzer]

Erm, I was in my year 4 class at primary school. When I got in the car to go home, my mum was like 'there's a big thing in America happening', and I was like 'lol'.

[Ian]

I was onboard the USS Gonzalez, which was docked in Plymouth, UK at the time. It was early afternoon and I was waiting for the workday to be done so I could hop on a train for an overnight liberty pass to London. The Captain got on the 1MC and announced that the world trade centers have apparently been attacked. A few minutes later, he announced that they collapsed, and that the ship was getting underway as soon as possible. The rest of the day was pretty hectic, hurrying up to get out of port while hearing a flurry of news and rumors come in.

We spent the next few days loitering in the English Channel with other NATO ships. I kept British radio on when I was on watch on the bridge; I didn't actually see pics or video of the events for a few days. Our deployment was scheduled to end in late October, but we spent a while waiting to see if we would go home as planned, or if we'd load up on Tomahawks and head east. The powers that be decided on the former option for us - lucky for me, since I was getting married in late November.

[Ronja]

I have posted about this before, but I could maybe flesh it out a bit.

http://rationalia.com/forum/viewtopic.p ... 25#p590425

I was walking up the small hill towards our Elder Daughter's daycare center, pushing baby Younger Daughter in her pram, when I heard two other parents, who were heading for their respective cars, talking to each other about an airplane that had crashed into World Trade Center. The weird thing is that there is a building called WTC in downtown Helsinki, too, so I at first thought that it was a small plane that had crashed in our own city center.

When I got home with the kids, MiM called me from his work, and told me what really had happened. I rushed onto the web, but kept the TV off until we got the kids to bed. I remember feeling utterly unreal, stunned, and very worried about where my sister was, as she traveled to New York regularly. Weirdly enough I cannot remember if she called or emailed, or both, to let us know that she was OK. She lost a friend, though.

The following day the TV was on when the main evening news in Swedish started, and the collapse of the towers was shown. Elder Daughter, then 2.5 years old, saw some of that coverage, and she spent a big part of that evening building Lego towers and knocking them over, repeatedly. She was also unusually fussy and clingy and seemed disturbed, which was not alike her normal behavior. Consequently, that was the last time our kids were allowed to see any TV news at all for the next five or six years.

Sometime within the next fortnight MiM and I had a fairly brief but intense discussion with his eldest brother, about the TV coverage and the kind of ethical/moral decisions TV journalists made about what to show and what not to. Eldest BIL pointed out that plenty of film was shot, not only of people leaping out of the windows of the floors above the fires, but also of those people hitting the street. Yet as far as he knew, those impact shots had been voluntarily censored by virtually every single TV channel in the world. In his opinion that was the right place to draw the line, and I tend to agree, even today.

Maybe two weeks after 9/11 it suddenly hit me that the thought "Why did God let this happen?" had never even crossed my mind - in fact, that no thoughts about any god(s) had come into my personal reflections about the tragedy at all before that time. That is when I realized that I had completed my 22-year journey from born-again xian via agnosticism into de facto atheism (I was then, as I am now, a 6 on the "Dawkins scale").

So I don't know exactly when I became an atheist, but I do know when I first realized that I am one.

[Tero]

I was at work, heard on radio. We had tge interwebz but all news sites were plugged. Saw first pics on Finnish news.

[Thinking Aloud]

I was doing this.

For those who can't be bothered to click:

I was in my "office", i.e. the other end of the kitchen at our old house. The phone rang late afternoon (UK time), and it was my mum. I think she was calling for something else, but said, "Have you seen the news? They're blowing up America." I switched it on and watched for probably an hour or more. It was quite surreal and unsettling even from this relative distance and detachment.

[Sælir]

I think you are being really unfair to Gawd this time.
I have to admit that my thoughts were about the same: So what?
Since then I have realized the devestating effects of this but at that time I had no idea.

I was working as a teacher and when I got down to the teachers lounge in recess they had dragged a tv in the middle so we could all see it.
I watched for a second and then sat down and continued working.
I remember thinking about the news coverage from the week before when 200 people died in India, the bus accident killing 50 in Pakistan etc.
Why would this touch me any more than all of that?

[Gawdzilla Sama]

I think you are being really unfair to Gawd this time.

It's the damned broken record character of his posts.

[Mr P]

I was at work and my ex-wife rang (not ex at the time).
"They've cancelled Diagnosis Muder!!"
"Why?"
"Someone flew a plane into the world trade center."
I passed the message on to my colleagues and one of them asked "Is it April fools day?"

Someone put their radio on in the office and we listened to events unfold for the rest of the afternoon.

[Azathoth]

I lolled

[Gawdzilla Sama]

I just saw this on another forum. Strange conjunction of diverse threads:

Trigger Warning!!!1! :

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