h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

My mum was having a mild heart attact at the time, she was on holiday with us sitting in our front room, whilst the para-medics were testing her and watching it on the BBC, Still doesn't seem real as it didn't seem real at the time. not sure if I would have known if the aboved mentioned hadn't happened, by the way my mum's was ok after a few days in poole hospital( a great place, if your ill that is)

I was in school when it all happened. It was really scary. The principal came on the P.A. system and told us not to turn on any t.v.'s. He told us a little about what happened, then left us clueless about the details. That was in the morning. I went through the rest of my day wondering what happened. None of the teachers would talk. I didn't find out what happened in any detail for about 5 hours.

That's strange. I would thinkk you could settle kids down with information. I doubt it did muc good to come over the PA, and say, "The United States has just suffered a horrific terrorist attack, your lives are going to be forever affected. Go back to your work."

I was on my lunch break at work, listening to the radio. The show went to the news and then it was reported that the first plane had hit. I assumed it was an accident. The rest of the story came out during the rest of the working day.

It was only when I watched the news at home that evening that I discovered that both of the towers had been completely destroyed.

I was at work at the time. I was about an hour into my morning when the boss rushed into the room, telling us to turn on the radio, quick! He said that there had been a terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, planes had hit the buildings. I looked at him blankly and blinked, trying to absorb what he had said. I have to say that absorbing the events of that morning continued to be a struggle ... as incident after incident assailed our senses.

We sat in the office completely stunned as the news reports unfolded. There was no television, no website, no pictures, only the voices of dazed reporters describing an unbelievable event on the radio. We continued to work (because we had to), but we listened pensively, mostly in silence. When word came that the Pentagon had also been attacked, I remember thinking, "That's it. Here we go ... World War III has just begun." (I still hope that history will prove that statement wrong.)

Afterwards, when it was reported that a passenger plane had gone down in Pennsylvania, I knew the passengers had fought back and had lost their lives. I knew. No one needed to tell me. Many of us would have done likewise in the midst of such brutal attacks ... they knew what had happened elsewhere and refused to allow it to happen again.

It seemed as though the sky had fallen that day. As I worked, I was only able to see a single photo of the smoking towers on AOL. A short while later, the buildings fell. Again, shock to the point of being numb. How could such a tragedy be fathomed? I couldn't wrap my mind around it.

That evening, I finally watched some of the televised footage on CNN. After several replays, I turned it off. I couldn't bear it any more. I haven't watched it since, preferring to listen instead.

In the few days that followed, I kept noticing the lack of jet contrails in the Ohio sky. There were no aircraft of any kind, anywhere. Ever since I was a young girl, gazing at sunsets atop my parent's roof, I had wanted to see a sky without contrails ...

It seems I got my wish ... but at a terrible terrible price.

Something worth noting was the friendship that was poured out towards America by many Canadians after the 911 attacks. During a trip to Ontario shortly thereafter, I was warmly surprised to find that not only are we liked, but we're genuinely loved by our northern neighbors. Somehow, that made me feel safer than anything else I had experienced around that time.

I walked into work and was told to go home, the pentagon had been bombed. I really didn't find out what exactly happened untill I got back to the house, but I knew it was something terrible. I remeber walking home thinking that it was a beautiful day out and there was nobody around. That was one of the eeriest things, few cars, nobody running around on campus, almost nothing. I got home and started listening to the news, thats when I heard about the WTC. I started shaking, and finally broke down when I turned on the TV and watched the footage of the the planes hitting and the towers collapsing. I used to go into New York to visit my grandmother and remember seeing the WTC from her apartment all the time. Its still hard to imagine it not being there.

I spent the next 3 days contacting family who lived in the area, or who were travelling at the time. I got lucky, none of them were harmed. Unfortunately some people I know from online were.

I was in an elective called Advanced Math (essentially precalculus), when the Calculus teacher entered the room, saying something about the World Trade Center and a plane crashing. At first I thought a plane just, somehow, crashed into the towers, but then they turned the TV on and I saw the second hit. The bell rang, and I went into study hall, at which point I began to hear about the Pentagon being hit (thought it was a bomb), and an incredibly stupid Government teacher said "This is just the beginning... there's going to be bombs going off all day." The rest of the day, we gazed at the TV in each one of my classes, though we did actually learn something in my last block because our network of TVs somehow overloaded. The next day was back to learning as normal, as much as we wanted the TVs on.

I was coming back from our morning lunch break in school when our Irish teacher told us that a plane had hit the WTC. He had no idea of casualties, but said there could be up to 20,000. There was a lot of talk and several bad jokes about it over the course of the day - and I take a perverse satisfaction from the fact that, within ten minutes of hearing and without seeing any pictures or news, I was telling all my friends that Bin Laden had done it. Then we did a normal days work, and I only found out the whole story at 16.00 GMT. The first thought that struck me was that the terrorists had scored a double whammy - hijacking a plane *and* blowing up a building. Then I got home, saw the pictures and disbelief set in.

I was sitting in our students' office in front of a PC-monitor that was about to conk out. Second one within 2 months I think. After hearing the news on the radio and after calming down again I went to the university's computer center to asked for a new monitor. There I saw the news on tv. The employee asked me: "Why do you always have to demolish things?"
4 months later my own monitor went bust.

I was in a meeting at the St. Regis Hotel in Manhattan. The whole thing is an entry in my journal on my PS though.

A year later and I still can't believe it. Sometimes it creeps into my thoughts for no apparent reason. One evening last week I was driving with someone and remembering how this time last year I was living in NYC and how different it is here. Then I remembered what was happening about this time last year. I remembered that day and the eerie days that followed. I still vividly remember the smell in the days that followed. It was the worst thing I've ever smelled in my life, particularly when I would remember what it was. We all sounded as if we had bad colds. Eyes were red and throats were raw.

Tomorrow I'm flying to the Washington DC area, where I'll be until at least the 12th. I'm somewhere between nervous and numb about the whole trip. Not entirely sure where though. I'm glad to be going and spending time with someone who means alot to me and I know it will be good for me to have something else on my mind but at the same time I can't help but wonder how I'm going to feel remembering it all.

I can remember where I was: at work. As usual, the TV was tuned to CNBC's US financial market coverage (early afternoon in Europe). The rest of that day is just a series of disconnected snapshots.

First, the brief news alert: a plane had crashed into the WTC. Shortly afterwards, the live feed from New York. The damage seemed confined to a few floors of the North tower at the point of impact. It was a tragic accident: inevitable when airports are sited close to urban areas. I remembered Schipol, 1992.

Then, as I and half the world watched, the second plane hit. That sequence, endlessly re-run, is burned into my memory. Work stopped. Our attention was on the live TV coverage. It wasn't ghoulish voyeurism: we simply could not make sense of such extraordinary events. Two accidents, so close together?

The final image is of the first tower collapsing. I was thinking: this can't be real. After that, my memory shut down. What I know of the rest of the day's events comes from subsequent news reports. I can't begin to imagine how that fearful, traumatic, live coverage affected people whose loved ones were in or near the WTC (or on hijacked planes) on the day.

Has 9/11 changed my life? Yes. Worldwide, there's now an unseemly rush to enact ill-considered legislation that will deem anyone guilty until proven innocent. Given the track record, I've no illusions that security -- whether it be at airline or national level -- will significantly change for the better as a result. The current spate of Islam-phobia worries me, too. All religions spawn a lunatic fringe. If for no other reason than self-interest, we must never judge the majority by the actions of the deluded few.

I think what sticks in my mind most, other than the images of the two towers burning - is the sickening lurch from 'accident' to 'design' when the second plane careered into tower 2 and news of other plane already in the air began being announced on the news.

An odd irony about this tragedy is how it's brought people together. I am closer to all my friends because of this - on that day, I spoke to every person I had ever come in contact with in my life making sure they were okay, and not just people in the northeast of the US.

Honest: I even called a friend in Arizona to be sure he was doing okay.

My memories of that day seem very much like photographs engrained in my mind.

I remember it being like any other typical Tuesday. I was at work plugging some numbers into a spreadsheet when my phone rang. It was my father, who was watching TV on a little set he has in his office. He said, "Is there a TV near you?" "No, why?" I replied. "Because a plane just crashed into the World Trade Center." "No way." I said in that you gotta be joking sort of way. "Really, it's on the news," he said. "When are they gonna stop letting wine-os fly planes around here?" I said in my typical sarcastic way. Then my father, with this strange uncharacteristic seriousness in his voice said, "You have been in that building before, I really think this is not an accident, you should see if there is a TV nearby and look for yourself." So we hung up, and I walked over to the guy in the cubicle next to me and asked him if he had heard anything about a plane hitting the WTC. He said no. When I walked out of his cubicle I was met by two other co-workers who had heard the news as well. We all went into my cubicle and turned on the radio, and that was when we heard of the second plane hitting. We all just stood there for a moment with a look of utter shock on our faces. By this time, the word had begun to spread throughout the office, and there was a constant hum created by the chatter and ringing phones. It became apparent that no real work would be done that day. For the better part of an hour, everyone just stood around speculating about what had happened, until we were told that someone had a small TV in the department across from us. We walked over and found at least 20 people huddled around this small 13 inch TV that someone had sat in an aisle and plugged in. As I stood there surrounded by all these people in suits, I remember thinking about how long the elevator ride was to the top of the WTC, and how long it must take to get out by foot through the stairs. Then I remember being angry with my co-workers who watched people jumping from the upper story windows of those buildings and acted as if they were watching an action movie. I went back to my desk to find several voice mails and emails from friends and family checking in to see if I had heard the news. I called my mother to check in with her, then began calling and emailing friends and family to check in, especially those I knew in DC and NYC. That is how I spent most of the day. All I really wanted to do was go home. The building I was working in at that time, being a banking operations center, was locked down and no one was allowed to leave. In the cafeteria at lunch time, a big screen TV was brought in, which normally only makes an appearance during the college basketball playoffs, and everyone sat and watched CNN not really eating lunch. Finally around 5:30, we were allowed to go home. Even traffic seemed to be different that day. For the rest of the evening I sat on my couch with the phone in my hand just watching the endless news footage. The strange thing to me is that that morning before work I had heard a news report about a recall on the dishwasher I had in my kitchen. I was so obsessed with the fact that my apartment may burn down because my dishwasher may explode. But that night, I put my dinner dishes in that very dishwasher without a second thought. The thought of my pitiful little apartment burning down didn't seem so important.

I don't know that the events of that day have really changed my day to day life. I still go through the same routine every morning as I did on Sept 10. But in another way it did change things. It was, in a sense, an end of innocence, and an end of that feeling of invincibility that comes with being young. On that day, people my age, who did basically the same thing I do for a living every day, got up and went to work just as I did, but they didn't go home at 5:30. It is a sobering thought.

I'm a night copy editor at a newspaper, so I was asleep when the attacks occurred, even though I'm in the same time zone where they happened. Sept. 11, 2001, was a Tuesday, which is normally one of my days off. So I had stayed up late chatting with my girlfriend and making plans for the next day.

At 9:12 a.m. (about three hours after I'd gone to sleep) my mother's voice wafted across the room from my answering machine. She lives in another state, and would never call me in the morning because she knows I don't rise until noon. She was saying something about an airplane hitting the World Trade Center. I tuned it out. I always have weird waking dreams, and this is what I took it for. After all, a plane hit the Empire State Building once, didn't it? I must just have heard something about that recently, and my dream interpolated it. So I figured. And I drifted back to sleep.

Not too much later, she called again, and this time I got up and turned on the television. I don't know how long I stared in horror. I was born in New York, and for many years my father worked just across the street from the Trade Center. He took me to the top of it sometimes as a child and held me up in the air to look around at our great city. It always made me so proud. None of us live there anymore, but we're still New Yorkers.

After I finally brought myself to turn the television off, I called him.

"Dad," I croaked, hearing my own weak voice for the first time that day. "The World Trade Center is gone."

"I know," he said.

And then I started to cry. He told me not to, but I did anyway.

I collected myself and I called the paper, knowing that my job as a journalist, too, was changed forever. Everyone else had already been called in -- I was last on the list that day and they told me to stay home, but to plan on working the next 7 days after that. I had expected as much.

I got in my car and drove to Tampa (45 minutes away) to see my girlfriend. On the way there I had to drive across the biggest bridge in Florida. It was almost totally deserted. The tollbooth attendant told me nobody wanted to drive across it.

Her eyes said what her lips did not. "It's a target."

My girlfriend was taking it much better than I was. In fact, most people I knew took it better than I did, because most of them aren't from New York. I had my agony as an American, and my agony as a human being, but there was also the very specific agony of seeing one's hometown brutalized.

My girlfriend just held me while I alternately stared and cried. She made me tea. I spent the night with her, but felt more alone than I had at home.

Meanwhile, a hurricane was approaching. I drove back home the next morning through gale-force winds. I showered and went to work.
It was time to stop dealing with the attacks as a citizen and start dealing with them as a journalist.

Driving to the paper, I realized that I'd had a full 24 hours to cope with this attack before confronting it on the job.

And I felt ashamed, because there were others who didn't even get 24 seconds.

I was in first hour science class (in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA, where I live, we're an hour behind New York) when my teacher said 'Oh, a plane hit the World Trade Center' and went on with the lesson for the day. She said it kind of lightly, and I thought that it might have been a light aircraft or something, and the plane would have taken the damage instead of the WTC. Then in history, my next class, the teacher talked about it with us (he's kind of a confused person so it was pretty funny) and a lot of people made stupid biased remarks. By that time I think the Taliban theory had come out, and a friend of mine, whose father is from Iran (which isn't even part of the Middle East) had written Osama bin Laden's name in Arabic on the board the hour before, and someone yelled, 'She's conspiring with bin Laden!' I was incredibly mad. But then again, I usually am.
Geometry went on uneventfully (although the teacher did later cover his bulletin board with a lot of newspaper articles on the attack), and it wasn't until English (fourth hour) that I actually realized it was serious... my teacher brought in a TV and we watched the news all hour. I felt patriotic for about four days, then the cynicism started kicking in as I realized how we were responding to hate with hate. Sucks, doesn't it? Oh well... All of my year-after reflections are actually responses to everyone else's year-after reflections. Dates don't matter much to me.

I was in bed at my folks house. Demazed called and told us to turn on the t.v. because the pentagon and the World Trade Center had been bombed. My Dad woke me up, and I watched it with detachment. I guess I figured with our foreign policy and our smugness, it wasn't a surprise someone should bomb us. I tried to feel something, for what was a terrible tragedy, for my country, for the lives at stake, and I couldn't.

When the second plane hit the second tower I saw it live and I realized I was watching as if it was a special effect on some movie, and I couldn't make myself feel.

I didn't feel much personally about it until I visited "Ground Zero" this summer. I walked up the viewing ramp and saw the immense hole that they had been pulling remains out of for weeks. I saw the block of memorial pictures and stories. I started to ... I realized the lives that were affected, and that it was something real, and that it happened to people like me, in my own time and nation.

When I had been on the ramp (covered with memorial graffiti), I had rested my hands in front of me. Looking down at them, I read "How many deaths will it take till they know that too many people have died" a quote from Dylan's "Blowin' in the wind". That's when I lost it for real.

I cried as my friend/NYC tour guide told me stories about people she knew who died, who escaped. She was a hard-core New Yorker and hadn't been there since it happened. We linked arms and cried together and the Military types guarding the ramp gave me a and said "you just can't prepare yourself for it, can you?"

I don't feel any more or less safe. I do have more of an awareness of how the rest of the world must view America. I do get tired of how marketable a tragedy has become.

I heard that the site is going to be a HUGE memorial. I hope they do it properly. So many of our memorial days are no more than another day off school or work for a bbq... I hope this one can retain some meaning.

-Yankee Shoes