What were you doing on this day, 23 years ago?

[Marc_LFD]

September 11 will forever be a sad day no matter what.

 

[emmanu888]

I was in school that day, i only learned about it when i came back home.

 

[Maximumbeans]

I don't remember the full day, but I remember my mum came to pick me up after school and she was really impatient. She told me something to the effect of, 'don't dawdle, we need to get back to [mum's friend]'s house. Something's happening in America, some lunatics have stolen a plane.' I had no idea why this was significant and why anybody cared about a stolen plane.

We got back just in time to see the second plane hit, live on TV, as the BBC were of course broadcasting it. I was 9 years old so I didn't really get what was going on. The spectacle was strange but it was just like watching a film. I had no idea why our parents were gasping like they'd just watched an asteroid fall to Earth.

 

[plasturion]

I was at home, and tv was on right before second plane hit the tower, but I just went out to throw away garbage, so I haven't seen it.

 

[rsx]

Was at home in portland, oregon with my girlfriend. Checked rotten.com to find a caption similar to 'everything goes fucko bazoo', turned on the news and, yeah.

That's not the interesting part that makes this story stand out. I was working at portland airport (pdx) up until about a month prior to 9/11. I had my first and only case of food poisoning and called out every morning for like three days. Went back in and they looked at me like I was a ghost. They didn't get any messages and it was pointless to argue (found a better job at kb toys a couple of months later). The security company was called huntleigh, it was mostly a do-nothing job. We sat at a big dome-looking x-ray with a small conveyor belt and scanned maybe 10% of all check-in's when they hit on a few criteria (paying in cash, one way, etc) which they told everyone was random. My job was running bags to and from the counter from 4am-noon. The most me and Justin ever found was bongs, ignored them for obvious reasons. One of our karen supervisors took her job way too seriously and called the bomb squad over what turned out to be nothing...Theresa, everybody hated her.

This story gets interesting because they canned me a month before they REALLY needed help. In the midst of all the fun, on my day off or whatever, I went back to the airport, bought a cup of coffee and a few donuts, then sat down next to their x-ray machine. Stared at them and I laughed, and laughed, and laughed some more because they were scanning every. single. bag. They weren't equipped for that much work because the scanner was slow, they had no employees, and the one supervisor who insulted me by saying "Food poisoning is no big deal, I've worked through it before" was running around, sweating her skinny ass off and struggling to stay alive.

Meanwhile, I was working at kb toys at clackamas town center and met a girl who I not only slept with but rekindled with, 23 years later, earlier this year. That was a fun job, it was when the dreamcast was marked down to $50 and when the first xbox came out.

Bonus part to this story: While I was working at the airport, I found a pamphlet from alaska airlines which I sent to rotten.com, with commentary, which they published on one of their sister sites, thegapingmaw:
https://web.archive.org/web/20040806112633/http://www.gapingmaw.com/250427/
It's crumpled up because scanners weren't feasible back then, our internet was limited to dsl that dropped at least six times a day, and gnotella was the p2p app of choice that never worked.

 

[ClipperDefiance]

I was in second grade at the time. One by one each of my classmates were picked up early, until three or four of us were left at the end of the day. The bus ride home was also unusually empty. I didn't learn about what had happened until I got home and my mother told me.

An important thing to note is that I'm from Long Island. My father and both of my maternal uncles worked in the city. My father worked in construction and was on a rooftop a few miles away and took a picture of the smoke. My uncles were both first responders as one was a cop and the other was an FDNY paramedic.

 

[Jayro]

I was freshly graduated from highschool and woking my same summer/seasonal job at the Steinfeld's Pickle Plant in Scappoose Oregon for the third year in a row. 9/11/2001 was coincidentally the last day of the pickle season, and then the plant was to be shut down and decommissioned for good as they were moving everything to their larger plant down in Grant's Pass, Oregon.

But not everything went to plan.

After the towers were hit with plaines, you could literally look up and down the conveyor belts and see everyone who had an FM radio on starting to cry while still doing their jobs, and it was very sad. I was young, and very confused. We all gathered around the single TV in the break area and watched in horror as the towers fell. They let us all go home at Lunch shortly after it happened, and they just closed the plant early that day. We still got a full day's pay because it wasn't our fault and we were still over quota.

I got home and got to see the replay footage of the 2nd plane hitting the tower. It's some of the craziest shit I've had to live through, and honestly wish I could forget it, but assholes like to keep bringing it up every fucking year.

"Never forget."
Fuck you, I'm TRYING to forget this traumatic event jerks!!!

 

[Beauterham]

At my moms birthday party..

 

[Hanafuda]

As an aside to this conversation, it might be of some interest that in early 1991 I was in Manhattan for about 6 weeks, "visiting" my old girlfriend who had a studio apt. at Tudor City. She lived and worked there but I was just hanging out for as long as some money I had lasted, which wasn't long because NYC cost$.

Anyway, while I was there one day just for something to do I went up to the top of the WTC to the observation levels, looked around, and came down. No big deal. Never thought it might not be there someday. But just reading this thread I wondered, did anyone else on GBAtemp ever actually see the twin towers, or go up to the top? Spoiler: they were really big, and really tall.

 

[JaapDaniels]

When i woke of a good sleep ate my breakfast, went to school, then tried to watch knight rider.
Then i got a bit angry for some lame interruption just before the good part about somewhere i don't know anybody, i couldn't care less about had to propagate about a terror attack what seemed to be of none information to me and they never continued the good part of the episode (which still annoys me).
Then we got diner (i don't remember what we ate), did my homework.
then got to bed read a few Donald Ducks, and slept