Where were you on 9/11?

[Dis]

I didn't try to get on the net. I watched tv from the time I woke up. I had to take a shower and go to work. I don't have internet access from work.

When I got home I watched Fox news and CNN for a bit then went to sleep.

[Hydey]

I was at home, post value added posts (spam) on the threads of apolyton , then I sat backed and watched the action on CNN .

[Dis]

I didn't think I was going to watch those programs. Yet here I am watching them.

I'm watching PBS right now PDT. They are going into the technical aspects of the WTC crashes and how it affected the structeral integrity etc etc. I watched the same thing days after the attacks, although there are a few new insights.

P.S. I'm still surprised they kept the bad words in the taped telcasts. It just seemed eerie that they were cussing in the taped video feeds on CNN.

[aaglo]

I was cyckling home from work. At home i took a shower and opened tv. And then I saw the second plane hitting the building. The rest you all know...

[Dis]

and I still remember those weird alarms the fireman have when they are still too long. It was the most eerie sound. That video just gave me the chills. This was just after one of the buildings went down. I think it was shot by the doctor cuy with the surgical mask.

They never play that video any more. It was the most eerie of them all.

[Guardian]

I was right here at work, just like today.

For those who don't know what I do for a living, I work in a company that runs computer systems for other companies - mostly banks and financial organizations. Our systems handle hundreds of billions of dollars every day, so we're pretty "hot" over here. I spend my workdays in a steel-and-concrete, bunker-like facility which is partially hidden in the forest and surrounded by barbed wire fences and various security systems...

Anyway, enough of that. To make a long story short, I work with computer systems and I was right here doing my job when, in the early afternoon of September 11, 2001, we started getting complaints about slow internet connections...

When you access the internet from a corporate network, you usually have to go through a proxy server, which acts as a gateway between the corporate net on the inside of the firewall and the whole wide world on the outside. Since all outbound traffic has to pass through the proxies, that's a good place to start looking for clues when there is a problem...

On September 11, 2001, at about 3 pm local time (9 am in New York), our proxies where swamped. A quick check in the service logs revealed the cause of the problem: hundreds of people where looking up various news sites on the web...

Something big must be going on...

A collegue went to turn on a radio. In the meantime, I opened up my own web browser and typed in the address of the largest newspaper in Norway. It loaded a whole lot slower than usual...

When it finally came up, the front page filled my screen with the image of the plane crashing into the second tower...

Airliners crash into World Trade Center

I stayed at work for about another hour, but I didn't get much more done that day.

[Nubclear]

I was taking my son to school (he was sick at the time, so I was talking with the teachers) when one of them came into the room and turned the TV on, and we got to see the WTC burning.

So I took my son into the car, and we recieved news that some middle eastern country had actually shot a nuclear missile at Washington DC. This was obviously false, but did panic me quite a bit.

I got home just in time to turn on the TV to see the second plane crash into the World Trade Center.

[Dis]

I wonder if they have numbers for how many people tried to access various sites.

I did not get on the computer all day long. I think it was Sept 12 when I finally got on Apolytoon.

[Pandemoniak]

I was working, harvesting grapes in Beaujolais (vendanging) during the whole day. When we come back to the farm, at 1800CET, I received a phonecall from my girlfriend. I rushed in the basement of the farm where everyone was having a drink, and start speking of it. Everyone mocked me and called me a "post-apocalyptical wackos". They didnt laughed more than ten minutes, until they decide to turn the TV.

[Harovan]

I was coding at work, when I suddenly received an email from a friend in Florida. She wrote, that the WTC towers and the Pentagon have been hit, seemingly the US are under attack and a war has begun. I answered, that it sounds more like an act of terror and added a blind guess in the direction of the usual rogues (Saddam/Taliban/OBL). As it became clear very soon, I was not the only one, who guessed so, even though there is still no prove.

[Lars-E]

I was at work.

Came home and saw the planes chrash on tv. One of the most dispicable acts of mankind.

[DRoseDARs]

I'm rather irritated about how I found out. My stepdad usually wakes up 'bout 4-ish in the morning, lets in the cat, has coffee and reads the paper. After news of the first plane hit (just before 6am in Reno, Nevada), he woke my mom up and turned the TV on in the master bedroom. They saw the second plane hit and both towers fall LIVE. During that fall semester I didn't have any classes on Tuesdays or Thursdays, so my alarm wasn't set to go off until 11am(2pm in NYC) at the earliest on those days. They let me sleep through one of my generation's (1981ish-2000ish) pivotal moments. They didn't want to wake me up; my mom said I might have been "grumpy" if she woke me up before my alarm. I might have blown up on her if I wasn't already numb from what I had seen by that point. Perhaps I've been spared the horror of having the LIVE images burned into the back of my retinas, but it still bothers the hell out of me that the only memories I will ever have of this event will be of PREVIOUSLY RECORDED or EARLIER TODAY footage.

One can only hope that I DON'T get a second chance...

[des-esseintes]

I was sitting at home, bored out of my ****ing mind, nothing to do, i turned on the comp and tried to play a game but it was no fun, surfed the web but all the interesting stuff i could find wasnt interesting at all, i turned on the TV but it was just the same boring ****, then i turned on CNN, it had some crap about World Sports i thought "what the hell" and sat down watching, half asleep, then the anchor comes and tells me that terrorists have crashed two airliners into the WTC

and i thought "finally some action"

[MrWhereItsAt]

I was asleep at home. The time the planes hit, I was just finishing an assignment. I went to bed uncharacteristically early, about 1am. Had I turned on the TV right then, as I normally do, I would have seen it all on CNN. Ever since, the last thing I do at night is watch about 5 minutes of CNN. As it was I woke around 8:30 to National Radio. Through the haze of waking up, I thought the news reports were from a radio series, like War of the Worlds in the '30s. Eventually I woke up enough to realise this was rather odd, as it was the normal news announcers who were in the story. I turned on CNN and lay in bed until 11 watching - transfixed. I then got up and my flatmate and I sat in the lounge flicking through channels (much like when the last bombardment of Baghdad happened, the live footage was on 7 of our Cable channels) until I had to go to class.

French class was not French class that day, it was poring over the newspaper I had bought on my way to class with the full cover picture of the burning towers. We spoke not a word of French that day, with one of the strictest lecturers the department has. All this time we spent comparing what we had seen and heard, trying to figure out exactly what had happened and when.

The atmosphere for the whole day was more than a little surreal. We were discussing things like any current event - that sounds terrible, but we are on the opposite side of the world, for most of us the USA is just what we see on TV, and none of us had ever been to New York. It is something that seems no more real to us than seeing footage of the war in Eritrea, floods in Bangladesh or student protests bloodily put down in Beijing. We knew it was real, but it was more fantasy than reality to us.

One point - I had really really disliked Bush since the election (never heard of him before then). The one glimmer of respect I have had for him through the whole term was when we later on saw his reaction to being told the news that first time, in that classroom. Somehow the reaction seemed to be something a proper leader would do.

[Tingkai]

Your memory might not be true

Don't be so sure that what you remember from 9/11 is accurate. A study done following the Challenger explosion found that "flashbulb" memories can be faulty.

The day after the Challenger explosion Psychologist Ulric Neisser asked his students to write down where they were when they heard the news. Three years later he asked the same students the same question.

About one in four students were wrong on every major detail about where they were, and only 10 per cent got the details right. The students who put down different answer were just as likely to be confident about their memory as those who provided the same answer as three years earlier.