Remembering 9/11

I had just started (the week before) my new job. In Boston. A co worker came around the corner and asked if I had heard about the WTC. We tried the internet but all websites were down.

Someone had a 9 inch black and white tv (like for a hurricane) so we tried to watch that but we couldn't see much.

I had to go into a meeting with my new boss who knew nothing about it. Just as the meeting ended I picked up a call for the boss. It was the Chief. I gave it to him and you could see his look... like why is she calling me here? I knew why. He said a few words and hung up. He goes "we are evacuating" why are we evacuating? The managers broke in and told us what happened. Everyone was leaving and me and my new co workers were going to try to watch at a local bar. It was packed. So we decided to go home.

I got to the train and it was packed. I mean all seats and people standing in the halls like a subway. People were passing around their phones in case you needed to call someone. The trains were required to go 5 miles per hour. A ride that should have taken an hour took 3.

I got home at 2 PM and finally got to see it all.

They made us go to work the next day. I just remember being very out of it for months afterwards. The boss that day is dead now but god bless him for being kind of my mental state. I did change my career trajectory afterwards. A mistake.

I was in grad school at the time. I was getting ready to go into the lab and run an experiment. I turned on the TV to watch the morning news as was my habit. I couldn't believe my eyes. I stayed glued to the television all morning.

I was at university. Still living with my parents. Got home after lectures, turned on the television and couldn’t believe what I saw.

I was working in a therapy department that was in a basement that was like a bomb shelter. There was no TV, no radio, no internet. So we relied on what we saw on the patient lounge TVs upstairs. Every time someone would come downstairs we'd all gather around trying to find out anything. We heard lots of rumors that we thought were true. I remember going down with a face I knew was ghost white to tell them the Capitol had been bombed. I would believe that for hours. When the 2nd tower came down I was writing an order in someone's chart. The lounge was a few feet away and the patients on that unit had end-stage dementia so they didn't really have the ability to follow. I heard a sudden gasp and looked up just in time to see the tower fall. I don't know where that patient got the connection that this was bad but he was right. After that they told us to finish with patients as fast as we could and go home. I had a home health patient that absolutely had to be evaluated that day so i did that first. The drive to her home put me near the airport and there were no planes. Just still blue skies. It's a good thing that patient did not need OT because it wasn't much of an evaluation. We mostly watched TV and chatted a bit about the horror. I'll always remember her American flag flying proudly against that blue sky. After that I went home and stared at the TV.

I was at work, and one of my colleagues told me something was happening in New York and to turn on CNN. I have no idea how she first heard. So I logged onto CNN's website and saw the second plane hit the south tower. It was unbelievable to me, I felt like I was watching something out of a bad spy novel. Eventually we were all sent home early, and I spent most of the day watching live coverage of the events on TV.

I was in grad school, getting ready to go to my internship. A classmate called and asked if I was watching TV. Told her no, I was getting ready to leave the house. She told me someone flew a plane into the Pentagon. Did not mention WTC. At first I didn't believe her, saying that was a Tom Clancy store. Turned TV on as one of the towers fell.

My internship was at a community mental health center. The drive there was spooky. My commute was on a major highway that's normally bumper to bumper. I was the only one on the road. Drove by a blood bank. The line to donate went around the building.

When I got to the center I was told it was all hands on deck to answer phones if kids called in a panic. We also prepped to deal with adult clients if they came in panicked. No calls. No panicked adults. Clients all acted like it was any regular day. We are in Florida though. It wasn't like it happened next door.

I was in the ninth grade, first-period drafting class when another teacher poked his head in the door and told us there was an attack underway in New York. In every class that day we just watched news coverage. School was not canceled, however.

I usually keep my tv on for background noise. I saw a plane fly through the first Trade Center and kept trying to remember what movie had this scene. Then I saw the 2nd building get hit and thought, I literally can't remember ANY movie with this scene in it. Then I realized I watching a live news update and not a movie. I was devastated.

I know I’m a bit late for this, but I didn’t see this thread until now. Also, I posted in a very similar thread on that day or maybe close to that day. It could’ve been last year!

I was sitting in my car in the parking lot for work. I always arrive early to get my bearings before starting my day. When I was driving to work, I noticed there was hardly any traffic. Somehow word got around because there was no social media then and smartphones didn’t exist yet either. Anywhere I was sitting and listening to the radio, and I heard them talking something about a terrorist attack in New York. And I thought nobody would attack US, that’s a mistake.

I went into the office and asked my coworkers if they heard something about a terrorist attack. They said no, but we all had boom boxes on our desks. So we turned them on and we started hearing about how planes crashed into the World Trade Center. The Internet wasn’t a big thing back then, so we were mostly listening to the radio. But a couple of people in the office were watching it on their computers. It looked like a scene from a disaster movie to me and I just couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

For the rest of the day, nobody spoke a word or got any work done. Same with the boss. For some reason, I couldn’t wait to get home and watch CNN, as if that would make everything OK. I guess I wanted answers right away. They still didn’t know what was going on and were trying to make sense of it. When I was listening to the radio, I heard a woman screaming, “We are being attacked, we are being attacked.” When I was driving home, I was looking up at the sky to see if bombs were going to fall.

We had the manager from the bank that we do business with visiting with my boss. She was from Chicago and she realized that she was gonna be stuck here for who knows how long.

So when I got home, I did nothing but watch CNN and actually did that for several days after. I don’t think there was anything else on anyway. Even if there was, I wouldn’t have been able to concentrate on it. In hindsight it wasn’t a good idea to watch so much news. It made me depressed and to this day, I limit what I watch.

It’s hard to believe an entire generation’s been born since then. 25 years ago. The only good thing I remember about that time, if you can call it a good thing, is solidarity in this country. It wasn’t like today where we’re so divided over so many things. Back then we were all just Americans and people proudly waved the flag. I saw flag T-shirts, flag bumper stickers, flags clipped to windows on cars, etc.

I guess it’s like Pearl Harbor for my generation, or to anyone who remembers it. It was the worst attack on our soil since that day I believe.

Tomorrow makes it 25 years plus one month to the day.

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Sent from my iPhone 📱