What were you doing when 9/11 happened?

God, I hate threads like this. Pretending to care just to get responses.

I was 27 and working security for a large investment company in Boston. It was supposed to be my day off but I had gone in for some overtime to train with the guy who was in charge of fingerprinting new hires. He had a small room to himself where new hires would be fingerprinted and he kept a radio playing the majority of the time. I remember we were in between appointments and I was logged into the spare computer checking my email/surfing the web when he said "something's going on."

He turned the radio up and I heard Matt Siegel of Kiss 108's "Matty in the Morning" show talking about the second plane going into the towers. We closed up and went across the street to where the security "command center" was located and we watched the different TV screens showing the awful images of what had happened and was still happening. My company also occupied the majority of office space at the World Trade Center in Boston so they sent me down there since there were only a couple of security reps stationed there normally. It was a little uneasy being at the WTC in Boston knowing that the WTC in NYC had been attacked but the Boston location isn't a skyscraper so that put my mind at ease. Still I remember seeing a military jet soar rather low directly overhead and it really felt like it might be the end of the world.

Not long after I got there the business units made the decision to send everyone home and within an hour the place was largely a ghost town. In one way it's hard to believe it was 17 years ago but in another it's hard to believe how much has really changed in those 17 years.

I was in bed sleeping and my mother told me to turn on the TV, at first I've thought an airplane crashed into a building, then when I've seen a second plane crashing into a building I immediately realized we were being attacked, I also remember having to return a movie that I've rented at the video store, then later that night I remember having to work and I remember everyone was so glum that we didn't get a lot of work done.

[deleted]

Living in Oregon, I was getting ready for work. Heard about it all on the radio on the way to work.

I was driving to a meeting and listening to Howard Stern on Q107 Toronto who carried Stern back then. I just sat in the car till 10 am switching back and forth on various radio stations. The 10 am meeting was cancelled and then I headed back to the main office. I missed the South tower coming down around 10 am but was back in the car for the North tower collapse around 10:30 am. Everyone was gathered around the radio when I got back to the office. Not much work was done that day or that whole week for that matter.

I was at work and happened to be chatting with a vendor who lived half way across the country from me. He happened to have a radio on in his office, so he's the one who told me about it. At first we both thought it was a small, private plane that had maybe gotten lost in fog (we had no idea what the weather was like in NYC at that point). But then the second plane hit the other tower and we knew it was no accident. Of course, everyone around the office was talking about it. But we stayed at work, although I don't think much work got done that day. It was very scary to then hear about the Pentagon getting hit and the crash in Pennsylvania. It made you wonder when it was going to end.

I didn't see it on TV until I got home from work. One thing I remember was how eerie it was with no aircraft in the skies for days. When you live in a big metro area you get used to seeing aircraft flying over quite often.

It was morning on the west coast. In those days, I was a regular on a software newsgroup. I fired up the 'puter, sipped my coffee as I scrolled through the message titles. A lot of them were along the lines of 'WTC gone...', 'WTC collapsed'...

I didn't know what the abbreviation WTC stood for. I assumed it was something related to computing or hardware and it didn't interest me so I didn't open the messages.

Then one headline came up: "WORLD TRADE CENTERS GONE! TURN ON YOUR TV'S!"

I stared at it stupidly for a few seconds, not comprehending. Then it hit me like a gut punch. I shouted, "Holy shit!" and sprinted to the living room. My 9-year-old son was in front of the TV watching with mild curiosity the over and over re-play of the jets plowing into the buildings .

I shouted for my wife. We both stood there stupefied, my wife saying "Oh my God!" repeatedly.

Trivia: How many people remember that episode of The Lone Gunman -- an X-Files spinoff -- that featured an attack on the WTC by an aircraft, just six months before the actual attack?