Terrorist Attack Day!
Tuesday, September 11th, 2001: Terrorist Attack Day! I’m writing this entry on 11/19/2003. Since the attacks have happened, I’ve been asked many times by various friends what I was doing on that day. So…I was up and getting the kids ready for school. I came upstairs to my office to check email and I heard the DJ on the radio (the MJ & BJ Morning Show) talking about planes hitting buildings, terrorist attacks and asking what the hell was going on. So I flipped on the TV to CNN to see if there was anything about it on TV. It didn’t seem like that big of a deal to me at first, I just thought it was some kind of weird accident and didn’t think it was actually a commercial plane. On CNN they’re showing pictures of just the one tower hit and a lady is on the phone talking about what had happened. Then she stops and says, “Oh my god, another plane just hit the building!” At the time CNN didn’t have a very good camera angle on it but after a few seconds you can see that a 2nd plane has hit.
I watched for a few more minutes and then went downstairs to show my daughter Emily. She didn’t care and just got mad at me for turning off her cartoons. She was just in kindergarten at the time, I don’t think there was a way to explain to her that it was real and not just a TV show. So I come back upstairs and call my mom at work to tell her about it. At the time she was the manager of a grocery store so she puts the radio news on the PA in the store so all the customers can hear it. I think I called a few more people to see if they’d heard about it, then I went downstairs to finish getting the kids ready and took them to school. All the moms dropping their kids off were going on and on about it. I just wanted to get back in the car and keep listening to the radio to see if anything else had happened.
When I got back home I didn’t get any work done at all that day. I just sat at the computer with about 4 chat windows open, talking to everyone about stuff as it unfolded. I stayed on fark.com and watched CNN all day. It was a bizzare day, listening to everything unfold. There were tons of rumors going on like the Washington mall being on fire and planes falling out of the sky all over the country, a plane hitting the White House, etc. One thing I really wish I’d done that day was pop a tape into the VCR so I could record the entire day of CNN so people could remember how it all unfolded. Watching it all happen live was quite surreal. It seemed like a big budget movie, seeing the explosions happen and New Yorkers flee as the buildings collapsed. It was hard to believe any of it was real, especially with all the false stories popping up and then being retracted.
So that’s it, that’s what I did. I sat in front of a computer all day, mesmerized by the events that were happening. Any time that I had to leave the house, I would hurry to the car and turn on the radio just to be sure that I didn’t miss anything new happening.