I was living in Silicon Valley working for a startup...4 years out of college. A college friend of mine on the East Coast woke me up at like 730a Pacific time and told me to turn the TV on to any channel and hung up.
Took my brain a couple minutes to wake up and realize this was for-real real.
I was in LA, hungover as fuck, my roommate knocked on my door and said “wake up, we’re getting fucked by terrorists”
I called my dad and we were on the phone watching the news when the first tower fell. I can still hear the fear in his voice, just a quiet, “Oh my God… no.” Then we just sat in silence for what seemed like an eternity.
I had just moved in with new roommates on the first, and had a girl spending the night. My roommate burst into my room without knocking and said, “come out here, you’ve got to see this.”
Under normal circumstances I would’ve been furious, but I could tell something big was happening
It was horrifying to watch, I was in school and the teacher turned on the tvs. They turned them back off after the first tower fell, but we all just kinda moved through the rest of the day in shock.
You guys stayed in school? They sent us home at lunch after they figured we weren’t learning the curriculum that day. Watched the coverage all afternoon. Repeat strike and collapses of the towers. Idn why the news chose that “last time in NYC” vibed recap like it was a sweeps week 2 part story arc, but they did.
I was in school too but I literally don’t even remember if they sent us home anymore. I just remember my first period teacher put the classroom tv on the news and we watched until the second tower fell. My memory of that day after watching that is completely blank.
This is a part of the reason we're so messed up mentally. I remember the Challenger explosion. After we saw it in class, we sat there for a minute realizing the people were killed. Then the teacher turned off the TV, and started our math lesson. No mourning, no therapy, no acknowledgement. Just "oh well, let's move on"
I remember hearing about the plane hitting the WTC on the way to school idly listening to the radio -- and then they mentioned a second plane hitting. I had very little idea of the ramifications of this at the time as I was like 12? I got to school and they had the TV on showing the towers burning live. We got to watch the towers collapse live, and the entire day (save for a couple short breaks) were just us watching the news and the teachers talking about it.
Some kids got picked back up and went home and didn't come back for a week (as if a small 2 room schoolhouse in the middle of nowhere, Missouri was a prime target for a follow up attack).
I was 12, too. I wasn't allowed to watch the news at home because it "wasn't for children", so I had no context when the RE teacher put it on the screen. I thought it was a film/movie and wouldn't accept assertions to the contrary until the next day, when I guess sufficiently many people I'd met seemed to believe it.
(I think people trying to convince me of things that weren't true was a common way of bullying at the time.)
When the first tower fell was when I realized how bad it truly was. I was only 14 at the time, I knew it was bad, I knew we were looking at at least a few hundred deaths, but I hadn’t even considered that the buildings would actually collapse.
I thought the planes hit too high, that the worst that might happen was collapse of higher floors. I really didn’t think we would see them just cave in on themselves like it was a planned demolition. When the first one fell I remember I was on AIM with a friend and asked him “Did they just really happen?”
Like, even though we’d been watching it unfold the building’s collapse just felt like it couldn’t be real.
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u/CaydeTheCat 15h ago
I was living in Silicon Valley working for a startup...4 years out of college. A college friend of mine on the East Coast woke me up at like 730a Pacific time and told me to turn the TV on to any channel and hung up.
Took my brain a couple minutes to wake up and realize this was for-real real.