11th September 2001, five years on
In an outbreak of staggering originality, I'm going to talk about this. However, since there will be plenty of other bloggers, let alone the salaried commentariat chewing it over, I'm going to stick to the personal angle.
I imagine most of us have a snapshot memory of this event. I was doing the same job I do now, which is home based freelance writing / consultancy of sorts, although I was in SW16 rather than Croydon, and still had my family living with me. Despite having a broadband connection, it was a phone call from a friend that alerted me to what was going on. Hence to the living room to see what was showing up on television. I saw the second plane hit in real time, and like everyone else was at a loss to interpret it. Lightning striking twice seemed unlikely, but the flying bomb possibility still seemed beyond the credible. Pretty soon all of the internet news sites has fallen over, and most of the internet was down due to traffic. I had a colleague / friend working in NYC, and had no idea how near her office was to the Twin Towers, and was unable to find out as the company site with the address was inaccessible. It was many, many hours later before I discovered that she was OK, and her office was in midtown well away from the horrors. She had been blithely unaware of what was going on, and only found out when someone from London rang her to ask if she was OK and was totally non-plussed before all was explained.
Having been a lifelong news junky, I have a range of snap shot memories of political etc events, ranging from the truly shocking like 9/11, the July bombing of last year, the invasion of Kuwait and the Challenger disaster to rather better news like sundry election results. My personal favourite is reading a stop press column on the back page of the Evening Standard one lunchtime in '91 informing me that the Sandinistas had lost the Nicaraguan election.
Anyway, your stories please.
In an outbreak of staggering originality, I'm going to talk about this. However, since there will be plenty of other bloggers, let alone the salaried commentariat chewing it over, I'm going to stick to the personal angle.
I imagine most of us have a snapshot memory of this event. I was doing the same job I do now, which is home based freelance writing / consultancy of sorts, although I was in SW16 rather than Croydon, and still had my family living with me. Despite having a broadband connection, it was a phone call from a friend that alerted me to what was going on. Hence to the living room to see what was showing up on television. I saw the second plane hit in real time, and like everyone else was at a loss to interpret it. Lightning striking twice seemed unlikely, but the flying bomb possibility still seemed beyond the credible. Pretty soon all of the internet news sites has fallen over, and most of the internet was down due to traffic. I had a colleague / friend working in NYC, and had no idea how near her office was to the Twin Towers, and was unable to find out as the company site with the address was inaccessible. It was many, many hours later before I discovered that she was OK, and her office was in midtown well away from the horrors. She had been blithely unaware of what was going on, and only found out when someone from London rang her to ask if she was OK and was totally non-plussed before all was explained.
Having been a lifelong news junky, I have a range of snap shot memories of political etc events, ranging from the truly shocking like 9/11, the July bombing of last year, the invasion of Kuwait and the Challenger disaster to rather better news like sundry election results. My personal favourite is reading a stop press column on the back page of the Evening Standard one lunchtime in '91 informing me that the Sandinistas had lost the Nicaraguan election.
Anyway, your stories please.
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on Monday, September 11, 2006 at 8:15 am.
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my one abiding memory was of Dubya talking about these'folks'.One of the strangest choice of phrases I've ever heard.
I was online, talking with colleague who were having serious aircon problem in New York telecity. We set up an ad hoc IRC server adn were discussing it all rolling. Some of set up our tv feeds as well in order to get news out to peolpe when CNN et al fell over. What was interesting in that respect was that CNN reverted to HTML flat text updates to cope with the load.
An online friend worked for Credit Suisse and was unobtainable on his cell. We were all very concerned. Two days later he turned up having left his cell in his desk in order to go away climbing and being out of contact.
I was having a domestic moment, cleaning the kitchen cupboards out with Radio 5 Live on when the shocked announcement was made and I then switched on Sky News and watched in horror as the second plane crashed into the WTC.
911 was an inside job
I was at work (UK) and a colleague told me about the first crash. We went onto the web and found a news channel that was accessible (Chile: they weren't out of bed yet). We watched the rest. He had the presence of mind to predict that "Even after this, we won't be able to rely on the Yanks against the IRA." Spot on, unfortunately.
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