Where were you on 9/11?

[Disgruntled70sHab]

Doesn't seem like it was seven years ago. Seems like just another day here at the office.

Back then I had taken some time off work to look after Mrs Dis when she had an accident four days earlier. I was in the neighbourhood diner getting a coffee when the first plane hit the towers. There were a few people there watching the story as it unfolded.

I saw the first tower burning, but I didn't really know what to think of it. I thought it was fire that had broken out until the new agency reported that an airliner struck it. I was doing something else in the diner when the second plane hit.

Some friends of mine had deployed recently to Macedonia to help implement a disarming plan that had been put in place. They worked with some of the American troops there and they said those guys were very quiet and subdued. Some of the guys told me they actually felt sorry for them.

Terrible day for a lot of people.

[franko]

I was in town on my way to work listening to the radio . . . the announcers [the aren't disc jockeys cause they don't spin discs any more] were laughing and talking and joking: can you believe that someone would fly into the WTC? What is he, blind?. A couple of minutes later the tone became a whole lot more serious.

Conspiracy theories still abound about that day . . .

A lot of people still hurt because of their loss.



On a somewhat though totally un - related matter, on August 10 2006 I was in London, and woke up at 6:00 ready to go to the airport and fly home. I realize that it was nothing as compared to 9-11, but brought things a little closer to home.

[Disgruntled70sHab]

Very fortunate, Franko. A lot of what secret services do often goes unnoticed.

Cheers.

[The New Guy]

I had class that morning (Java programming, IIRC) and so I was all the way out in the Engineering building at Memorial when it happened. I lived next door to campus (I literally rolled out of bed in the morning to go to class). I first heard about it on the way home from class - it was a Tuesday so I had an early morning and a late afternoon class - and so I was on my way back to the house I was living in to take advantage of the fact that I had almost the entire day to do nothing (oh how I miss those days).

As it happened my wife and I met up that morning (as we did every Tuesday morning) for breakfast - me on my way back to class, her on her way to hers. We grabbed a muffin (and I grabbed a coffee) and we sat down to do a crossword and talk. She mentioned to me - in passing - that two planes had hit the WTC. She was shy on details - she had slept in and so had to rush to meet me, and had just caught it on the television on the way out the door. I assumed it was some yahoo in a small plane trying to buzz the WTC for thrills or some kind of tourist plane trying to get too close to the towers for the sake of the show (and the second crash was some idiot trying to get pictures). And so we left it at that and chatted about class and whatnot.

I got home in time to turn on the television and see the first tower fall. It took me a few minutes to figure out what was going on - a Cessna crash would've been enough to damage the tower, perhaps even severely, but to bring down a hulking monolith of concrete and steel. Then I saw photos and video - it hadn't been a small plane. It had been an airliner.

I sat and watched the television dumbfounded that day.

By the time I went to my second class campus was abuzz with the news. Unlike other areas of Newfoundland, St. John's decided to put people up in Mile One (which makes sense as it's a lot easier to herd people if they're all in one place) and many of them were bussed to campus to give them access to e-mail (I remember having to give directions to computer labs several times that week). Some of the professors - in particular one that was teaching my sister-in-laws commerce class had dire warnings (he insisted all his students invest in gold as paper currency would soon be worthless) but for the most part it was subdued. But much of that time is a general blur - so much happened so quickly. There was a memorial held by the students union, and I remember speaking to my mother some time in there (who had caught the report on the radio at work and thought they were talking about the plot of a Tom Clancy novel she was reading - where terrorist hijacked a plane and flew it into a building in much the same manner).