[ethbr0]

As someone who watched the second plane hit live on CNN, it was... hard.

People who weren't alive or were otherwise busy that morning don't remember the uncertainty after the first plane. Everyone thought it was an accident.

No one could conceive it was a deliberate strike. Everyone knew terrorists hijacked airplanes to fly to third world countries, not to commit suicide into buildings.

That cognitive dissonance all collapsed in a single instant as the second plane hit. And that's a lot to process all at once. I still can't watch video footage without crying.

If I'd been the videographer, you'd better believe I'd have locked this in my attic and forgotten about it.

[chrissnell]

I remember it like it was yesterday. I lived in northern Virginia and was working at AOL as a sysadmin. I was young and a little flaky back then. I overslept that morning and when I woke up to take the dog out, it was a beautiful, crisp fall morning. I called a coworker to tell him that I would be late for the team meeting (this being pre-Zoom and before the "standup" became a thing). He said, "no worries, dude. Turn your TV on, the WTC is on fire and we are watching it." I turned my TV on and a minute or two later, the second plane hit. Instantly, I knew that this was going to be a big deal and since we helped run CNN.com, I quickly dressed and hauled ass to work to help with the inevitable web traffic surge. My buddy called me and said, "don't bother coming in, they are evacuating the buildings". There was a rumor that a hijacked plane was circling DC and AOL was right near IAD. I went back home, only to be called in an hour later. We were taken to the AOL leadership bunker, which I didn't even know existed. A large conference room deep underground below a small data center on the campus. We spent the next two days nursing CNN. for lunch on

[germinalphrase]

“We were taken to the AOL leadership bunker”

Is this a “critical infrastructure” thing?

[HeyLaughingBoy]

Exactly! I remember getting dressed for work while listening to MPR (Minnesota Public Radio) about an airplane hitting the WTC and I figured it was just a small Cessna 172 or something so I turned on my TV just in time to see the second impact live.

Watching it happen live with the immediate knowledge that it was obviously a deliberate act was, like you said, a huge amount to process all at once.

I actually think that having a goal like "get dressed and go to work" probably was a great benefit to my mental state.

[vitaflo]

I had my clock radio set to MPR as well and woke up to them talking about the first plane. Usually the news every morning didn’t register but that day it did.

I turned on the TV to see what was going on, which I usually don’t do. After a couple minutes of “oh my that’s a tragic accident” the second plane hit an I immediately knew it was no accident.

I worked downtown Mpls at the time and no way I was going to work that day. Thankfully my boss told everyone to stay home.

Seeing all of it live is a memory burned into my brain the same as watching the Challenger blow up live in middle school.

[vb234]

The memory I have of that day is similar. I had an early morning class and work in the afternoon. When we left the early morning class, a friend got a call from his parent asking if he was okay. We were in a midwestern college town nowhere near in danger of being a target. Checked the news on Yahoo and all we could get at that point was that a flight flew into the World Trade Center. We thought it was a private small jet that flew off course and laughed it off. Went home, turned on the TV and saw the second plane hit.

I still think back to that day and have some guilt about our initial reaction to the first flight. Given how instantly news propagates today I assumed that back then we knew the details already and just made light of the suffering. I moved to NYC right after college and recall those early years in the city where everyone knew every little detail of the day. Your recollection assuages some of the guilt I harbor from that day.

[ethbr0]

I think everyone of a certain age, who was around their peers as it happened, either made a thoughtless comment or heard one.

[dkarl]

Cognitive dissonance even for people who missed it. At the time I was in my early twenties, started my day late, and usually didn't check news until after getting a little bit of work done. When I got to work, nobody else was there, which was weird. There was a TV on an AV cart in the middle of a hallway, also a bit weird. There was a note from the CEO saying that everyone was going home to be with their families. That also seemed a bit weird, but I shrugged it off. Our CEO was a family values guy, very Christian, and I had heard he used to lead prayers in the office when the company was smaller. (It didn't occur to me that it was a Tuesday and everybody's families should be at school or work.) So I sat down with my coffee and started working. After a while, at a time that I guess would have been close to noon in New York, I went to cnn.com, which came up as a primitive-looking site without any media, so I chuckled internally and took a screenshot, thinking CNN had been hacked. How could CNN let themselves get hacked! I skimmed over the headlines thinking that the hackers would have put in something political or humorous, but I didn't see anything like that, and started to think, okay, this is CNN's real content, so their web site got hacked or otherwise impacted by something, so they put up the text site while they recover. I starting thinking about what could have affected their site like that, and then it dawned on me that the top headline might have something to do with it.

I know others have been downvoted for saying this, but for me the shocking nature of it took a while to sink in. I had not had a chance to travel much yet at that point. I had been to New York City once, just like I had been to Europe once and seen London and Paris and Rome. I came from a small town in Texas and had a habit of thinking of all of those places as the "real world" where big real things happened, places that had diplomats and stock exchanges and famous universities and celebrities and, well, terrorist attacks. The 9/11 attacks didn't violate that sense of order. On a gut, emotional level, it was just a real world type thing happening in a real world type place. It took me a while to understand why people were reacting so differently.

[freedomben]

Indeed. I was in high school watching CNN live at the time the second plane struck. There was tremendous uncertainty about what had happened. I thought for sure it had been egregious pilot error.

We watched as the second plane ran right into the tower. At that moment we started realizing that it was intentional. But even then, the uncertainty about who would do that to us and why, was really worse than before.

This event really changed my entire life. Prior to this I had plans to finish my automotive tech trade school program. Within the next few days watching the footage of people leaping to their deaths in preference to burning alive, and as more and more information trickled in about who was responsible for the attack, I decided I needed to join the military to help ensure that nothing like this ever happened again. My life would have played out a whole lot differently if not for this.

[SllX]

I second this. I was a child in Elementary school at the time and had just woken up and walked into the living room with the television on after the first plane attack. The reporter (forgot the network, I’d seen the same footage repeatedly all day that day and never wanted to look again) was still talking about the possibility of it being an accident right up until the second plane attacked. Even in my eyes at the time, one might be an accident but two was an attack.

[vlunkr]

My only connection to the word "terrorist" until that day was from a James Bond game (I was also young). Its hard to believe now, but the idea of a deliberate attack on civilians was really not on most people's radar at all. I think that's why most people's reaction to the second plane was pure bewilderment. It wouldn't be like that now.

[boomboomsubban]

>Its hard to believe now, but the idea of a deliberate attack on civilians was really not on most people's radar at all.

Though people were far less concerned about it than now, it's not fair to say it wasn't on their radar at all. The WTC had already been attacked once, and Timothy McVeigh was executed for the Oklahoma City Bombing only a few months before 9/11.

Even on the day, in that twenty minute window between crashes the general narrative was it might be an attack, just no reason to think it is yet.

[Geezus-42]

I was in 6th grade, when we walked into second period English the teacher had a new channel on the TV. Noone had told us anything was going on so my friend and I were sitting in our desk making jokes thinking it was some movie until the teacher came in and told us it was real, then the second plane hit. Weird day...