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I was working at One Wall St Court at the time and I took the 2 train down to Wall St station in the morning. The first plane hit before I got out of the subway and as I was walking to my office I saw a huge crowd of people staring in the direction of the towers. My first thought was “loving tourists.” but once I got to where they were standing I could see that one of the towers was on fire so I thought “OK. That’s not something you see every day.” Then I figured that since my office wasn’t on fire my boss would still expect me to be there. I asked a nearby cop what had happened and he told me that a plane had crashed into the building. At this point terrorism hadn’t entered my mind. I just thought that someone was going to get fired for being an idiot since I was pretty sure that the whole area was restricted airspace. As I was getting ready to continue to work the second plane hit. I didn’t see the plane from where I was standing though, just the explosion, so I assumed that the fire from the first plane had ignited something and wondered why there was a bunch of explosive stuff in the tower. At this point a bunch of people screamed and started running away. I was kind of grump so I stayed where I was and decided I would knock over the first person who tried to run into me. No one did and everyone stopped running after a few seconds. Some homeless guy got nocked over so I helped him up and headed to work. When I got in I ran into the CEO and told him that a plan had crashed into one of the twin towers and he told me, in his thick French accent, “No. TWO planes.” Now I’m starting to think, “Wait a minute that can’t be a coincidence. This could be terrorism.” “Of course it’s terrorism.” He shouted back. Well, I remembered that several years before a guy had parked a van full of explosives in the garage of the WTC. A few people died and there was a bunch of property damage. I figured not much would come of this either. Fire crews would put out the fire and that would be it. So I headed into my office and called up the one and only client of our web hosting management software. The software was basically still in beta so I had been spending all day every day trying to help him get our stuff working. At one point I heard what I thought was a large truck driving by outside. And then the CEO stuck his head in my office and told me that we were evacuating the building. This sounded pretty dumb to me but I told our client I had to go and we all walked downstairs. Once we opened the emergency door all I could see was ash flying horizontally past the door. I think I actually told the CEO “gently caress no. I’m not going out in that.” So we all went back to our office. By this point every room with a window had a light dusting of ash all over it, even though the windows were closed. The CEO started freaking out and asking what we should do. I figured we might have to stay there a while so I started filling trash cans with water and told him to go get the promotional shirts so we could soak them and use them as filters. At some point while were were doing this his girlfriend showed up. She had been job hunting in the area and apparently ended up having to huddle in a doorway with the CEO of Citibank while the towers were collapsing. This is when we figured out what the rumbling was and where all that ash came from. The building superintendent also walked in and handed us 3 of those paper dust masks. After a while we decided to make an other evacuation attempt. We handed the mask to the CEO’s girlfriend, the secretary and the intern and the rest of us tied the water soaked shirts around our faces and we took off and started walking north. The dust had settled but now everything was covered in a thick layer of that ash. It was a scene that, until then, I thought only ever showed up in cheesy post apocalyptic movies. Once we got to the Brooklyn Bridge everyone decided to head into Brooklyn, except me. By this point we had heard that there were other plans crashing into stuff so I’m thinking there’s no way I’m going to join thousands of people on one of the most recognized bridges on the planet. Besides, I lived in Manhattan. What was I supposed to do once I was in Brooklyn? I figured that everything would be on lockdown for a while so I got bought a bunch of water and some food that would not require working gas or electricity on the way home. Just before I got into my building I passed a tall black transvestite. She was walking in the opposite direction as me rocking her head back and forth into her hands and chanting “Arabs killed American citizens.” to herself over and over. As I passed her I remember thinking, “Oh poo poo. I’ve seen this movie before. Things are about to get really bad.” SeventhUncle fucked around with this message at 01:51 on Oct 16, 2015 |
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Oct 16, 2015 00:49
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Commie NedFlanders posted:The 90's was a wonderful decade to be a child. gently caress ya! In addition to all the NickToons I was also first introduced to "Japanimation". It was a good time in general, while I'm sure there were just as many kidnappings and what not my folks were totally fine lettering my sister and I run around the neighborhood all day, fishing at the local pond. There wasn't that culture of fear that I feel permeates everything now. SeventhUncle posted:I was working at One Wall St Court at the time and I took the 2 train down to Wall St station in the morning. Wow that was an intense read. Thank you for sharing that. SalTheBard fucked around with this message at 16:27 on Oct 16, 2015 |
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Oct 16, 2015 16:23
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Being born in the early 80s basically let those of us who were skip the terror of the Cold War for the most part and then get old enough to realize what was going on around them in a period (the 90s) when America had Definitely Won This poo poo and everything was looking up up up. Then 9/11 happened, and the recession, and everything else just in time to kill our optimism before age 20.
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Oct 16, 2015 16:36
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Not to be massively insensitive, but being massively insensitive - As a foreigner (and like a 10 year old), it was an incomprehensible bad thing on the news. The 7/7 bombings were probably the closest I got to the 'genuine 9/11 experience', but even then only because I had relatives working in London that day. I'm pretty sure it didn't induce literal lifelong breakdowns in people living 4+ hours away who didn't know anybody there. Do you remember Bosnia 12/9/93? Bosnia 13/9/93? 14? Because plenty of people probably died on all three days. The culture of fear is business as usual even for the first world, outside of of our postwar victory lap. Strategic Tea fucked around with this message at 17:01 on Oct 16, 2015 |
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Oct 16, 2015 16:55
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Strategic Tea posted:Not to be massively insensitive, but being massively insensitive - It's fine. I don't think you are being insensitive at all. It was a shocking day for Americans because it had never happened here before on that scale. I can see if how someone from Bosnia would look at it and go "Welcome to my world mother fuckers".
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Oct 16, 2015 17:24
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SalTheBard posted:It's fine. I don't think you are being insensitive at all. It was a shocking day for Americans because it had never happened here before on that scale. I can see if how someone from Bosnia would look at it and go "Welcome to my world mother fuckers".
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Oct 16, 2015 17:28
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Other random anecdotes: We didn't have a TV or radio in the office so the only "news" I initially got about it was from slashdot.org. I remember that being so full of conjecture, speculation and contradictory information that I just ignored it. The first official news I heard was from people gathered around cars with the radio turned up. The following weekend my roommate and I were moving. We had already signed the lease and our current lease was up so we had no choice but to follow through. The move involved going through the Lincoln Tunnel. There were military guys with assault rifles stationed at the entrance inspecting cars. One of them opened the back of the truck and just waived us through. That seemed weird because the truck was stacked floor to ceiling with furniture and we could have had anything buried in there. After the move my commute was supposed to be a short trip on the PATH to WTC station. That obviously didn't happen.
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Oct 16, 2015 20:39
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Stupid mobile posting has lost a couple of my attempts at a post here but my short thing is that the people commenting on the hatred are so right. I live in an area that is incredibly white and the closest things to foreigners are Hispanics a state over, and it was crazy the hatred that 9/11 spun up and turned a lot of good people kinda nutty and aggressive as they listened to Imus in the morning, O'Reilly on midday radio, then on O'Reilly on TV at night. Similar to a previous poster, my dad would just like, randomly comment on killing "fuckin Muslims" or swearing at tv personalities whenever not-Fox News was on the tube. Really bizarre stuff. And now its just turned into drummed up fear for China and N. Korea. Although I see the adults in my life as intelligent and level headed pre 9/11, they probably had choice opinion about the Soviets I didn't get to hear (born in '88).
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Oct 16, 2015 21:34
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Back then, my dad mostly read The Economist and probably read CNN online for 9/11 info. He never went around going gently caress MUSLIMS like most people apparently. Maybe because we were Canadian? Dunno.
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Oct 17, 2015 01:41
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TTY for the deaf and hard of hearing. No idea what's going on until the calls start pouring in, people freaking out left right and center about airplanes crashing in NY. rear end in a top hat 'horrified to do anything that might look like an infringement on deaf people's rights to confidential calls' management threatening to fire anyone who says anything about the calls they're getting. Same assholes refusing to put up tvs so we know what the hell's going on. Same assholes refusing to let any real news distribute through the call center at all. 'interferes with the job'. Sitting in our isolated bubbles getting no real info on anything, unable to respond or interact with the calls in any way. Far, far too many calls going to dead lines in NYC. The calls that went to live people were mixed bag 'everything is ok' or 'your sister was in the building when it collapsed'. Probably worse - text is sterile and impersonal, having to talk like an emotionless robot to a live person expressing their grief? People WERE fired in my center for breaking confidentiality and demanding to know what the hell was going on. Management and supervisors monitoring calls heavily and writing out pink slips to people who reacted with 'unreasonable emotional outburst'. We're weren't 911. We weren't trained to withstand the worst sort of torment and people panicking and all this crap. Welcome to the second day on the job. Lessons learned - pay and benefits were far better than anything I could expect to find in any other job at my skill level, but I'd pay for it with my soul. Kind of made the calls where I had to talk to traumatized abuse victims being verbally harangued by their abusers somewhat tolerable in comparison. Made the touching heart to heart contacts of some of my favorite calls all the more rewarding. At least I had the absolute worst that job could possibly ever throw at me early on. Fortunately management provided 'grief counselors' to handle PTSD after the fact when the initial panic had died down, probably the least they could have done after that.
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Oct 17, 2015 12:00
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Jesus Christ I'm sorry that happened.
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Oct 17, 2015 15:22
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Holy poo poo. I'm sorry, I can't even imagine having to be the relay through which messages or those unanswered calls went.
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Oct 17, 2015 15:29
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That had never occurred to me before. Now that you mention it though, there must have been a whole bunch of people in situations like that; phone operators, ATC operators etc. Condolences.
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Oct 17, 2015 22:05
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