where were you?
Sep. 11th, 2002 10:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chestnutcurlsThis is my "where were you when" story. Thankfully, I did not lose anyone in the attacks, nor was anyone close to me directly affected by them. So this is just the perspective of an ordinary American.
On September 11, 2001, I had been an official employee of my company for exactly one week. As I drove to work that morning, there was nothing good on the radio, so I was listening to Tonic on tape. I had no idea what had just happened in New York. When I got to work, no one was here. I settled in and wrote Kathy an email about something very silly that had happened at Bible study the night before. I was laughing out loud as I wrote it. It was the last thing I would really laugh about for a long time.
Just as I hit send, my boss appeared in my doorway and told me that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. I didn't really understand what she meant, and to be honest I didn't think much about it. I was thinking in terms of some wayward small plane that had crashed near there. I got the idea that it was something more when she came back a minute later and said, "Everyone's downstairs watching TV. Let's go see what's going on." So we collected my other boss and went down to the big conference room. The second tower had just been hit and everyone was freaking out. A few minutes later, the correspondent at the Pentagon interrupted himself to say that he had just felt a huge explosion. They went to a wide shot of the building, and it was smoking. That was when I knew it was war.
We went back upstairs. Someone found a radio for me so I could sit in my cube and listen. I needed to hear familiar voices, so I started making phone calls. I had had plans to have lunch with my friend Wendy, so I called her to make sure the plans were off. :P She sounded pretty panicked. I asked her what was going on on campus, and she said all the guys were running around saying it was war and talking about enlisting and stuff.
The person I really wanted to talk to was Ryan (we were pretty close at that time). I kind of wondered why he wasn't calling me. Finally I got hold of him on his cell phone. He was on his way back home, since classes had been cancelled. He parked himself in front of CNN, and we called each other at intervals for the rest of the day.
To me, the scariest thing about that day was the total surrealness of it. It felt like a bad nightmare. Nothing was safe and anything bad seemed possible. After the FAA decided to ground the planes, I remember hearing at one point that they were re-routing all the planes to Memphis. This freaked me out, because I thought for sure we would get bombed or something.
Nobody did any work that day. At about 3:00 Linda told me I could go home. I practically flew home to Bartlett to see my family. They were all there except my dad, who ended up staying at work pretty late because FedEx was helping with the re-routing. After a few hours, I went to Evan and Ryan's apartment and we watched the coverage for a while. Then we went to RUF, because we had all agreed that we should still have it. On the way there the President gave his address. For some reason, I very clearly remember listening to that on the radio in the Porsche with Ryan while we were driving down I-40.
I do think the press went overboard after a while. After about three straight days of watching the coverage, I finally had to turn it off because it had gotten to be too much for me. It's good to remember, but there's a fine line between remembering and beating yourself over the head with it.
Anyway, those are some of my memories and I wanted to write them down for posterity. If any of you would like to share yours, please do.
On September 11, 2001, I had been an official employee of my company for exactly one week. As I drove to work that morning, there was nothing good on the radio, so I was listening to Tonic on tape. I had no idea what had just happened in New York. When I got to work, no one was here. I settled in and wrote Kathy an email about something very silly that had happened at Bible study the night before. I was laughing out loud as I wrote it. It was the last thing I would really laugh about for a long time.
Just as I hit send, my boss appeared in my doorway and told me that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. I didn't really understand what she meant, and to be honest I didn't think much about it. I was thinking in terms of some wayward small plane that had crashed near there. I got the idea that it was something more when she came back a minute later and said, "Everyone's downstairs watching TV. Let's go see what's going on." So we collected my other boss and went down to the big conference room. The second tower had just been hit and everyone was freaking out. A few minutes later, the correspondent at the Pentagon interrupted himself to say that he had just felt a huge explosion. They went to a wide shot of the building, and it was smoking. That was when I knew it was war.
We went back upstairs. Someone found a radio for me so I could sit in my cube and listen. I needed to hear familiar voices, so I started making phone calls. I had had plans to have lunch with my friend Wendy, so I called her to make sure the plans were off. :P She sounded pretty panicked. I asked her what was going on on campus, and she said all the guys were running around saying it was war and talking about enlisting and stuff.
The person I really wanted to talk to was Ryan (we were pretty close at that time). I kind of wondered why he wasn't calling me. Finally I got hold of him on his cell phone. He was on his way back home, since classes had been cancelled. He parked himself in front of CNN, and we called each other at intervals for the rest of the day.
To me, the scariest thing about that day was the total surrealness of it. It felt like a bad nightmare. Nothing was safe and anything bad seemed possible. After the FAA decided to ground the planes, I remember hearing at one point that they were re-routing all the planes to Memphis. This freaked me out, because I thought for sure we would get bombed or something.
Nobody did any work that day. At about 3:00 Linda told me I could go home. I practically flew home to Bartlett to see my family. They were all there except my dad, who ended up staying at work pretty late because FedEx was helping with the re-routing. After a few hours, I went to Evan and Ryan's apartment and we watched the coverage for a while. Then we went to RUF, because we had all agreed that we should still have it. On the way there the President gave his address. For some reason, I very clearly remember listening to that on the radio in the Porsche with Ryan while we were driving down I-40.
I do think the press went overboard after a while. After about three straight days of watching the coverage, I finally had to turn it off because it had gotten to be too much for me. It's good to remember, but there's a fine line between remembering and beating yourself over the head with it.
Anyway, those are some of my memories and I wanted to write them down for posterity. If any of you would like to share yours, please do.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2002-09-11 09:42 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2002-09-11 09:46 am (UTC)for the next few days I was glued to the news hopeing that things would get better.
then sunday night I heard that Alex Zanardi had lost both his legs in a wreck during the CART race in England and could die. That was all the bad news I could hear.
(no subject)
Date: 2002-09-11 09:58 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2002-09-11 10:58 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2002-09-11 12:14 pm (UTC)