pinkcat

I was a gift shop owner,working in my shop, we had the TV connected to the cameras in the shop , it flicked through the TV on its cycle, thats how I saw it, we kept peering up the stairs to the TV to see what was going on, it didnt have a huge impact on me straight away as that was in my "fear of flying" days. I grew up in a military town and we had plenty of terrorist scares in the days of the IRA, I remembered the defiant attitude my mother had shown in the 70s in the face of threats and got on the plane, finally, 18 months after 11 September 2001

TymnBalewne

I was on Queen Elizabeth 2 between Southampton to NYC. We ultimately docked at Boston.
Cunard Line handled the situation beautifully.
At the time I lived a mere few blocks from the WTC and had been in the shopping plaza of the Towers prior to leaving for the UK to join the ship.

mj12g

While I was only 16 at the time, I had an internship in New York during the summer of 2006. One day I happened to ask my manager if he was in NYC on September 11. He proceeded to hold all his phone calls for about half an hour (a lifetime on a trading desk) to tell me his story. He was working at Barclays at the time, and his building was just a block or two from the World Trade Center complex. They felt their entire building shake and assumed a bomb had gone off. As he is a corporate bond trader, he worked very closely with folks at Cantor Fitzgerald (you can look up the story of that company if you don't know about it already). He said that the most horrifying moment of his life was watching all the direct phone lines to people at Cantor go dark, one by one.

They had to evacuate the building, and he was on one of the very last (perhaps the last) New Jersey Transit train to leave Manhattan. Before he boarded the train, he saw the towers on fire. By the time he reached New Jersey and looked back toward lower Manhattan, both towers were gone. He then spent the next 9 months or so attending funerals for all the friends he had lost. Pretty heavy stuff. Let's hope such a tragedy never happens again.

wringme

I had been to the Red Sox and Yankees game the night before. Rained all night! In retrospec, lets be tahnkful the terrorists were not baseball fnas or the loss of life could have been much worse.

I was in the Sheraton talking with a Swiss account and could see, in my peripheral vision, a plume of smoke. I recall wondering how that level of pollution could be condoned in NYC but was totally distracted by the call. I then left the room for breakfast and encountered a cleaning women in the hall crying. She told me that a plane had hit the WTC. I went back in the room, sat on the end of the bed, and turned on the TV to see what the news was. I saw the building (the first one) and then slowly turned my attention to the real world out the window. I actually believe I turned two or three times before I consciously understood the view was the same as the TV. I sat for a while just looking, alternatively, at the screen and at the scene unfolding in real time. I cannot tell you truthfully if I saw the second plane hit on the TV or in real time but I will never forget the surreal event.

Soon a knock came on the door. It turned out to be a couple that worked as NASCAR photographers from NC and they asked me if I could see the towers from my room. I did, and they spent a time taking photo's of the implosion. I had a rental car so the next day, I drove the couple and myself from NYC to ATL.

DMSFCA

I had just stopped by the WTC subway station in the morning because they have a bunch of good magazine kiosks and I needed some reading material for a flight from EWR to SFO later (also on United, but not the same flight that was hijacked). I remember breaking a $100 bill to do it and thinking it was probably good because sometimes when traveling nobody wants to break anything larger than a $20.

Friends have stories about how they had appointments there later that day. One had a meeting for 9am that was canceled at the last minute, and they were upset because they had prepped for the meeting late the night before.

The saddest thing was outside the churches in lower Manhattan. There were walls of smiling pictures of missing friends and relatives, all with "Have you see this person? Please call xxx" - families clinging on to hope that maybe a relative was only hurt and unable to call, but still alive. I think that's what hit me the hardest through all of it.

CMK10

I was in my junior year of high school at the time at Rye High School in Rye, New York about 25 miles from the World Trade Center. Four graduates of my high school died along with my dad's best friend's wife. Almost everyone I went to school with was affected by the tragedy.

I had flown to London and back on a family trip only two weeks before. The trip seemed really routine at the time, had I known it would be my last trip of an era I would have probably enjoyed it more.

gormless

I was an offsite meeting in Myrtle Beach SC - the proceedings were interrupted by the events and we all had to figure out how to get home. I and my boss drove the rental from SC to DCA.