I was at home recovering from minor surgery on my back. I was flipping through the TV channels and not really paying much attention, I remember seeing it on the news and thinking it was a new movie trailer or something. When I realised what was actually happening I knew I was going to war, I'd only been in the army a year.
Ask HN: What’s your 9/11 story?
11–15 of 15 posts
Re: Ask HN: What’s your 9/11 story?
#12I was on my way to work just north of the Chicago loop, when I met a few guys on the subway from a financial firm who said they were told to leave work and go home because an airplane hit one of the twin towers in New York City.
Airplanes had hit buildings before, as sometimes pilots do stupid things, it wasn't unheard of for a Cessna to have an ooops into a sky scraper.
So, it was confusing, but I wasn't really worried.
When I got to work everyone was in the lunch room watching the TV, and we saw the rest of it in real time. I wasn't sure I was going to be able to get back home to Indiana, we weren't sure how many other planes were hijacked, nothing
Re: Ask HN: What’s your 9/11 story?
#13I (from Europe) was traveling in Indonesia, read about it, but it all seemed very far away until in the weeks after that I saw more and more people in Bin Laden T-shirts looking angry at me.
Re: Ask HN: What’s your 9/11 story?
#14I was in my fourth year of a five year undergrad/grad program at BITS Pilani, India. It was late in the evening as someone in the rec room caught a whiff off it while channel surfing. The TV played BBC World broadcast non-stop for the next 36 hours, and the whole dorm was glued to it.
Re: Ask HN: What’s your 9/11 story?
#15My wife and I were living in Brussels, Belgium. She was General Counsel of Euroclear, the company that exclusively handles all back-end clearing and settlement of trades on the Amsterdam, Brussels, and Paris Bourses, as well as the London Stock Exchange, and the majority of all back-end clearing and settlement throughout Europe.
I was between employers at that stage, and for some reason I had turned on the TV and was looking for English language channels. I stumbled across CNN, and decided to stay there for a while. After a little bit, they started coverage of the first tower being hit, so I called my wife to see if she had heard, and wondered if they had any customers there. Turns out they had a lot of customers in the towers, so she had me put the handset up next to the TV, and she turned on the speakerphone in her office. Everyone in her office gathered around.
Not too long afterwards, another plane hit the second tower. I watched it go through.
I think that may have been when the operations team went into emergency mode, and they had a TV in that room. I think she spent the rest of the day down there, although I don’t think she spent much time looking at that screen. Her attention was required elsewhere.
Later, when Prince Charles was touring the US, and specifically NYC, he talked to some of the people in the British companies that had offices in the towers, and some of those people spoke about how critical the support was that they got from Euroclear, and that this support saved their company.
I like to think that she played some part in the success of Euroclear in weathering that storm, and that I may have played some part in helping her.