Guess I’ll add my little story:
I had just started my first real job out of law school in Texas, and my kinda-girlfriend was doing a study abroad in London. My office was a few doors down from the office break room, and I remember hearing a lot of noise from there, but I didn’t really think much of it—plus, being the new hire and all, I didn’t want to look lazy or nosy or anything like that by going down and investigating.
Anyway, the kinda-girlfriend sent me an email saying that she had heard that something had happened in New York and asking if I knew anything about it. I replied with a “no,” but she kept pestering me and I eventually went down to the break room and saw half of the office watching the television (the Today Show, to be precise) and I think that I spent the next hour or so there, just watching the news.
What I vividly remember are four things:
1) The internet was exceptionally slow that day. Emails didn’t go out very quickly, and trying to refresh pages took seemingly forever. Why the kinda-girlfriend was trying to get news from me by email instead of just watching the BBC in London is something I’ll never understand, because it made no sense and was like relying on the Pony Express when the telephone was beside you.
2) There was a brief report at the time of a car bomb at the State Department, which later turned out to not be true, but when I heard that I remember thinking, “gee, this all seems to be rather serious” and I was beginning to wonder if anywhere was safe or if the entire country was going to be under sudden attack, including the relatively small and isolated town where I was.
3) That night, I had the sudden desire to hear my mom’s voice, which I had never really felt before.
4) The basic news networks had wall-to-wall coverage for days. No commercial breaks for hours and hours. It was both mesmerizing and horrific at the same time.
What I know for a fact, though, is that I didn’t see either Tower get hit in real-time, and I’m pretty sure that I didn’t see either of them fall either.
|