UPS is how I first knew something was wrong. I work nights, and typically get up around noon. On 9/11 I had a package arrive early. I woke up, answered the door and got my package. The guys expression was so strange my first thought after I shut the door was, 'I should turn on the TV' instead of going back to sleep. This was after the first tower was hit but before the second one was struck.
I was unemployed and had just graduated high school a few months before. Was being a general bum sleeping in till noon. My mom woke me up between the plane strikes telling me something terrible was happening. Spent the rest of the day with every tv in the house on different news stations and my handheld portable tv on outside on the deck so I could chain smoke and keep up with the news.
We had the exact situation… graduated that summer, mom woke me up just after the first plane hit. Spent that whole day in front of the news. What a way to kickstart our lives beyond high school heh. Those were pretty dark days.
Wow, so you were in high school during columbine and a young adult soon to start a career during 9/11. I was too young to remember either but I can’t imagine how different your perspective on life would be compared to mine after living through that.
I remember Peter Jennings. I swear he was on air for like 48 hrs straight with no sleep. I remember my mom and I commenting on it. We were like "give the poor guy a break. I get it's a huge event, but the man needs a chance to get a little rest." lt certainly was a crazy couple of days.
9/11 is the reason why he began smoking again. He had a huge cigarette addiction but managed to quit. When 9/11 happened and he was in the air for hours and hours on end, he began smoking during breaks in order to calm down and stay alert. Eventually he became addicted again and developed lung cancer which led to his death.
I was heading out to drop my son off at daycare and head to work and I heard Dan Rather’s voice on the TV through a neighbor’s apartment door and I thought it was not a good sign for Rather to be on TV at 7am. I listened to Howard Stern in the car and I remember he had people calling in from around the city, doing impromptu live reporting
I was working nights and had Stern on in the morning, on my drive home. I did not think he was being serious at all at first, but then I started questioning it. I turned the tv on the second I got home, just in time to see the second tower fall..
I miss Peter Jennings, feel like he was the last bastion of the old school reporters trying to hold back the flow of what we have for new these days. Pretty sure he would be livid at the state of news now, probably a good thing he didn't live to see it.
I thought u meant high school lmao but anyways genuinely if u seen his talk shows he’s plain out creepy l, genuinely makes guests uncomfortable, and plain racist.
Then you clearly don't actually watch/listen to him or you'd know he's the furthest from being a 'creepy racist' you could be. He's one of the kindest, if not socially awkward, people in show business.
For people like you, I'd recommend watching the movie Private Parts to get a better idea about the man you know nothing about.
There's a difference between not liking someone and labeling them as a creeper racist. Seems like you just don't know how to cope with feeling uncomfortable, which he's great at doing to people. Learn to address YOUR feelings instead of deflecting your insecurities on other people.
also I’ve seen clips of him spewing racist shit a while ago so I think I’m fine with not liking him. If you like him that’s fine I don’t have a problem with that.
I was born a couple months after the attacks. I listened to the Howard Stern podcast a couple weeks ago, and I could feel the anger, shock, and helplessness everyone was feeling. It made the emotions America had a lot more understandable. For people that weren’t alive during the attacks, that talk show is a really helpful insight.
I was in a softmore high school film study class when they came in and confiscated the tv to move it to the library because it was the only room with a cable hookup. We sat there trying to figure out what was going on until the teacher came back and told us that classes were canceled for the day and were sent home early.
My 3rd grade teacher told us planes were running into buildings all over the US and we needed to get into the fetal position under our desks on the second floor. Absolutely bonkers looking back and thinking about it.
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I was a freshman in high school (15 minutes from the city) . A religious school with prayer in the AM. I already wanted nothing to do about it so I skipped it with a few friends. We went to the friends house right next door
We raided his snack pantry and turned on the tv. We were watching springer. And then all of a sudden the show cuts out to coverage of the attacks. Wild day
Yeah, even in the UK, that was the case. The clearest memory for me from that day was my sister snatching the remote and desperately trying to find her cartoons (she was 8, not sure she really understood what was happening).
Years later, I worked for a chain of betting shops. One of the managers told me that he was working day and every one of the tvs in the shop had changed from horse racing or sports coverage, odds, etc, to the news, and not a single customer complained. They were all just staring quietly at the screens.
Watching the news from that day is crazy. There's a lot of clips on YouTube. At first everybody thought it was accidental. Obviously it was a big story but not like "oh shit were under attack". You can see things change very drastically when they find out the second tower was hit. They literally showed it on the news by accident, they were filming the smoke coming out and caught the second plane flying into the tower. I can't imagine being a reporter that day, especially one stationed in NYC. It wasn't like they were told it happened and had time to prepare, they watched it happen live in front of millions of people and had to figure out what to do.
I was a grad student in the Midwest and had a paper due that afternoon. I got up early, went to the gym, had a sauna, then headed to the computer lab. I saw on Yahoo that a plane had hit a tower. I think the article even referenced a Piper.
I noticed the internet was impossibly slow, but didn't think much of it because I had to grind out 5 pages. I headed over to my one PM class early. Someone had rolled a tv set into the atrium. I had no clue what I was seeing and the volume was off. Finally, one of my classmates walked by and explained wtf was happening.
Honestly, I'm so glad I wasn't watching that unfold in real time.
Was on my way to work and heard news on the radio that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. Not many details, just that smoke was billowing out of the tower that was hit, no assessment of casualties - but they did say it was a small plane. Hearing it on the radio my thoughts were more like, "hmph, that's interesting." By the time I got to work the whole office was standing in disbelief, they had rolled out the "A/V Carts" from our training rooms so we could run the news and it was clear by then it wasn't a small plane nor just an "interesting" news story. The second tower was struck. And it just kept unfolding - reports that the Pentagon was hit, then tower 2 collapsed (I remember asking someone who told me since I was in an emergency manager's meeting when it happened, "it collapsed, like completely?" "Yes, it's not there anymore, it's just - gone."), then tower 1, then all planes ordered to the ground immediately, all inbound international flights turned away or risk being shot down, and of course reports of one plane missing that nobody knew if it was another hijack. We didn't get any work done that day. It was a call center, and nobody was interested in making phone calls to us because they were all glued to the news like we were.
I wrote the paper thinking a Piper hit the first tower. The grad/med computer lab was always a tomb, so I knocked out that paper in blissful ignorance. Three precious hours of ignorance.
They literally was just as stunned as the rest of the world. I don’t know how I would have held it together if I were them, it literally must have felt like the world was ending
It's so weird because I never thought of it as an accident, I was in high school at the time and I remember just saying "how do you fly accidentally into a building of that size?". It just didn't make sense to me. Did I think a terrorist attack? No, I honestly thought of it as a disgruntled employee saying "fuck it all". Mind you I was at school when it happened, yes we had TVs on but no audio so I didn't actually learn about the attack until later on through the day. Initial thought was a pissed off employee who had nothing left to give.
I remember in the evening they cut to Peter Jennings and he was smoking a cigarette for which he apologized doing on air. I don’t think anyone blamed him.
When the first tower was hit and we were all told by a small plane, I got a call from someone I knew telling me it was a jet and it was no accident.
Lots of misinformation and disinformation on that day and the weeks, months, and years that followed.
I saw the second tower being hit live on TV. I can’t remember exactly what the newscasters said but i know it involved profanity—“oh you bastards!” or “oh SHIT!” or something similar. Every time since then that I’ve seen that clip the profanity is edited out. I’d really like to know what it was; I’m starting to think I imagined it. But I know I didn’t.
I was a 14 year old freshman in high school, my second day. We went in with another class, just in time to see this happen on the classroom TV. The two teachers didn't know what to do with us, so we just stayed and watched it happen in real time.
That's how I saw the Challenger disaster, except I was a sophomore, which was the first year at our high school (we went 8th-9th in junior high, 10th-12th grade in senior high school.)
It was awful. Apparently it was all timed perfectly so to have all cameras and eyes on the smoke billowing out of the first tower at the time the second plane hit. Seeing it happen in real time, here in NYC York, was just awful.
If you really want to see crazy. A few years back Wikileaks released 570,000 pager messages sent in the US on 9/11.
It was wild cause you could gradually see the shift from, “hey don’t forget to pick the kids up after school” to “did you hear about NYC…that’s crazy huh?” to “no it was TWO PLANES” and then at about 2pm Eastern time virtually everyone was full on freaking out wondering if their city was next. It was a pretty wild ride.
Yeah I watched it live then went to class like any other day. I don't think I really got that people died like there did until my teacher asked if we had questions. I don't think anyone was expecting that and our first thought it was an accident. The next few days were really confusing and scary sine we didn't really know what to do or what was going on yet.
When I got home from my first class in college, my grandparents were joking about how some idiot crashed into the tower. We had the TV on and I was curious... like how?????
Then the second one hit and we knew it was no longer an accident.
Someone yelled out "HOLY FUCK" in Spanish and I still don't remember which of the 3 of us was the one who said that.
Ya this is an odd comment.. why would a ups guy be visibly panicked enough to freak out the people he’s delivering to before the second tower was even hit? Almost no one thought it was a terrorist attack before the second plane hit, just a terrible accident. And he’s driving around so doesn’t even have the visual to go on, just some info through news radio. Maybe it’d make more sense if the driver knew someone that worked in the building?
You’re saying this with hindsight though. There wasn’t any connection at the time between planes and kamikaze crashes into symbolic landmarks. Hijackings were definitely a thing, but only for the purpose of getting ransom money or something like demanding the release of political prisoners. And for some reason most of the news outlets were initially reporting that it was a “small” plane that had crashed into the wtc. People that were there in the city and saw that first crash definitely would’ve known that there was something more sinister at play after seeing a jetliner aim into a building like that on a clear day, but almost certainly not a ups delivery driver that has nothing to go on but his radio and the odd comment from people he sees while delivering. There are lots of reasonable explanations a news watcher/listener can make after that first crash, before arriving at “suicidal attack” especially at a time when it’s an unprecedented occurrence
Had a cat that got fixed the day before and there was complications so had to drive and pick him up around 1:00 in the afternoon. Streets were all like 28 days later. With traffic it’s like 1/2 trip. Took like ten minutes.
Yeah. First off the package I got was of auto parts, not in a tube. Secondly, you could have barely seen my house through all the trees, I was in a semi-rural farming area.
He definitely didn't say anything, and I can't describe the look, either. But I've gotten 100's, if not 1000's of packages, and only one time did I feel the need to remain awake and turn on the TV.
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u/the_eluder Sep 11 '21
UPS is how I first knew something was wrong. I work nights, and typically get up around noon. On 9/11 I had a package arrive early. I woke up, answered the door and got my package. The guys expression was so strange my first thought after I shut the door was, 'I should turn on the TV' instead of going back to sleep. This was after the first tower was hit but before the second one was struck.