MadSkillz: I was working at a gas station making good use of my science degree at the time. The boss put a tv up near the cash register to watch it unfold.

I'm surprised that you weren't getting more use out of your math skills that day, specifically addition and multiplication. All the gas stations I remember that day jacked their prices up to unheard of levels like $5/gallon in an orgy of gouging. I'm glad we haven't had to relive that experience again since.

/wait, what?
//not blaming you as a former gas station employee

hicksfa2: Note...it's not everday that a 330,000lb airliner going 400 mph...you know just...slams into the side of a building.

No building on this EARTH is designed to take that kind of impact.

That's not true. One is. And it got hit that day. And that's the reason the Pentagon only has a plane sized hole in it rather than two giant holes going through it.

I was a high school sophomore taking ISTEP exams that day. I had also started drivers ed on Sept 10, 2001. Right before our first ISTEP segment, a teacher informed us that a small plane had hit one of the WTC towers, but didn't seem upset about it. That would have been about 8:50 or 9 am.

By the time I was done with that test segment, the world had changed.

I could tell something was going on, and said that I needed to used the restroom to get out of class. I didn't go back. We just sat in the gym and watched the coverage, taking our ISTEPs as quickly as possible. People in my tiny little Midwestern town were terrified. I was so scared that LA would be hit next, because my grandpa, aunt, uncle, and cousins live there, and so did my mom at that time. Plus assorted family friends in NYC, DC, and in the military. Terror.

X-RayPaintSpray: Perhaps I missed it, but I have seen no-one commemorate the brave people who decided to fight back and crashed the plane to stop the terrorist attack.


Here ya go

http://www.nps.gov/flni/index.htm

germ78: I'm surprised that you weren't getting more use out of your math skills that day, specifically addition and multiplication. All the gas stations I remember that day jacked their prices up to unheard of levels like $5/gallon in an orgy of gouging.

My family used used the local run gas station after that because they were the only ones to not raise their prices.

ravenlore: cheer:
As I'm watching, I see 2WTC collapse. And in my shell prompts with the continuous pings, I see:

!.......................

That was the most horrifying thing I've ever seen on a PC screen.

As a tech, THIS is the most chilling post in this thread so far for me.

See, I knew "horrifying" wasn't the word I wanted, but the whole thing still rattles me. "Chilling" is a far more accurate description of what I felt when the pings stopped.

Thank you, ravenlore.

I guess I'll add my rememberance to the thread.

I had a rare day of no morning classes on Sep. 11th so I had set my alarm to 11 am Eastern time (I was in school in Wisconsin). My radio was set to the college radio so I literally woke up to commentary of the attacks. I guess in one way it was good because by the time I woke up it was pretty much over, I don't think they knew the fate of Flight 93 yet, so I didn't have too much of that wandering through the wilderness feelings that you can see in the original thread.

hicksfa2: //Apparently don't read books either

They do, but only other Truther books.

/vicious circle

TsukasaK: It's a valid question. Where the hell are the FDR's?

Tatsuma: No, it's not. They were pulverized under tons and tons and tons of rubbles and melting steel.
A brain is never useful if you don't use it.

This is Fark, after all.

Anyway, here's Wikipedia: 9/11 conspiracy theories

GORGOR!!!!! WHERE ARE YOU, MY LOVE???@!!?!?!

evil saltine: Extreme_Lukewarm: I was asleep in Seattle and my dad called me from CA. It was quite unnerving to be woken up at 6:30 or so to him yelling, "WE'RE GOING TO WAR, WE'RE GOING TO WAR!" I turned on the tv just in time to see the second plane hit. I went to my morning class in a daze and they let everyone out for the day. I jumped up in the middle of the night/early morning for months afterwards when I heard planes flying over the city.

Damn bugs whacked us, Johhny.

utardsRock: GORGOR!!!!! WHERE ARE YOU, MY LOVE???@!!?!?!

today is the last day to register for the Squatter's golf tourney in Park City btw.
/jack of thread

MONSTERTRUCK: X-RayPaintSpray: Perhaps I missed it, but I have seen no-one commemorate the brave people who decided to fight back and crashed the plane to stop the terrorist attack.


Here ya go

http://www.nps.gov/flni/index.htm

I was talking about this thread.

I clicked on one of the morning shows literally as they were just notified of the first strike. Saw the second one live. I was housesitting for a friend who only had dialup and I couldn't choose between the net and having a phone. I zinged it back to my house with broadband and spent the rest of the day FARKing, watching the news, and trying to contact friends in the military and overseas because I didn't know how bad it was going to get.

My most vivid memory of it all, though? Hearing the guy on the radio say "We've been encouraging everybody to go to the Red Cross to donate blood for the survivors, but it... umm... it doesn't look like they're going to need it. But go donate anyway. I, umm... *silence*..." and the music started playing.

This whole thing pisses me off. You ask one goddamn question about the nature of what, precisely, happened, and you immediately become the target of "truther" ad-homs which have fark all to do with their arguments and more to do with the fact that they dared to ask a question in the first place.

/would like to have a reasonable discussion with someone on this
//sources cited, etc

PainfulItching: solokumba: Can't we just move the fark on people!

No. Never. Get bent.

Well eventually everyone who experienced it will die, and the people who experienced the after effects will die, and then the people who experienced the very tail end of what we could consider the after effects will tell other people stories (I.E. My dad was at X location at Y time when he found out), then it will eventually become nothing more than an emotional reaction from students studying the beginning of the 21st century, similar to the millennial generation of today with World War II.

Also I think it depends on the reason why you are holding onto it. If a person is just holding on to it for the purpose of hatred towards others or to feel like it gives America a reason to play IRL Risk need to let it go.

That being said you have people who feel almost no problems with bringing guns to town hall meetings, who want to run around pretending they are going to end up in concentration camps because they lost the election (remember the "liberal" reaction during GWB?). They want to pretend the government is the enemy yesterday, but all of a sudden today is "Merica day". These people are fakers.

Even so I wish that all the people who are sad today, feel it legitimately. There are people out there who are going to say "I feel sad" purely because of the date, but on any other day would face the news of the death of any other American whether soldier or civilian with complete apathy. These people aren't being true to their cause.

I guess I'll add my more or less mediocre story to the rest:

I was 10 at the time, someone mentioned to a teacher hearing about it. My middle school had TVs in every room (normally tuned to a school channel for announcements/time keeping) so the teacher turned it to the news and everyone watched it instead of doing math or english or something like that.

Being ignorant children we didn't really understand at the time what we were seeing, and as shameful as it is to admit, most of the kids were just interested in seeing a building fall down (I.E. people had the same reaction as seeing a building implode). For me personally it didn't start to sink in until I actually was watching the next episode of The Daily Show.

The memory that sticks out most to me was watching the opening salvo of the US Navy for Operation Enduring Freedom one night with my parents. I would say that is the beginning of when I started learning that understanding politics is an important thing in everyday life, and that I didn't want to end up as some idiot who just makes some ignorant/reactionary/stereotypical statements when others begin talking about any sort of political topic. To this day I still feel the most amount of friendship towards people who can actually bother to think about things outside of their day to day lives and it causes me a great deal of confusion towards people who get annoyed when others discuss politics.

Interesting side note--there are some (more than likely very few) who believe that this never happened. This morning at my security job, a guy mentioned to me as he drove on to college grounds that there's no reason to hold a memorial service (like my college is) because the attacks didn't happen. Since I was on the job, I neglected punching him.

I remember the gas prices going to $5.00 a gallon that day.

Sweaty Dynamite: dstanley: downstairs: Pearl Harbor?

What did people do on December 7, 1949?

They celebrated that the farking War had already been over for four years.

I think the question was more directed to the observation that 12/7/49 was eight years after Pearl Harbor just like today is eight years after 9/11.

cheer: jst3p: cheer: !.......................

That was the most horrifying thing I've ever seen on a PC screen.

Never seen gorgor link, eh?

I LOL'ed.

Speaking of which, where is the troublemaker? We should have a NSFW image that somehow relates to the twin towers and/or the pentagon.

pd771: I love the conspiracy theorists who believe the demolition theory. Considering that no building that size was ever demolished, they'd have to hide mounting the explosives and get past the bomb sniffing dogs that the WTC used because of the original attack.

Duh, they were in on it. Government paid them to look the other way.

RobTheNerd: <troll>The tragedy is that people out there still buy the government lies about this.
It was an inside job, and if you contest that you're either too ignorant to matter much or too much of a coward to accept the truth. Either way, keep your mouth shut.<troll>

Learned Louisianian: ugh. Not this nonsense again. There's no evidence it was an inside job, and a great deal of evidence to the contrary. People who espouse this nonsense are just as bad as the people who think magic is real, or aliens abduct people.

Wait, so you're saying that aliens did it?

God, I remember being in 8th grade english when the headmaster walked in. I thought, "Great, what have we done now?", assuming he was there to tell us off for not being a good example to the school. When he said a plane had hit one of the twin towers I nearly stopped breathing. It's still a bit of a shock to think they aren't there.

/can't imagine what it was like to be on the top floors
//RIP

KhamanV: cheer:

(I think he was on the 69th floor.)

Does he still wake up in the morning, near pissing himself with the terror of that day and the joy of being alive? Because Christ farking knows, I would. Glad he made it out.

/I picture your dude going down those stairs like The Flash

I didn't know him as a close friend, just a colleague. He seemed OK afterwards, but I dunno. Like you, I think I would've ended up rather farked up.

On a much more minor level, we learned a lot about what we were doing wrong in terms of disaster recovery planning. Their main DR site was a few blocks away; it never occurred to us to plan for the closing of Manhattan. Also, a lot of our contingency plans revolved around shipping routers or whatever; we never planned on all flights being grounded. Our client had thousands of displaced workers and we needed to set up some kind of VPN infrastructure ASAP. Ended up having to use trucks.

/Rambling

I remember being in school the whole time. The principal was a total fascist, ran the school like a prison, and wouldn't let anyone turn on the news or anything in class or let us leave. I guess he was trying to keep the day normal or something, but it still pisses me off to no end that I had to learn about all the details by word of mouth in the hallways. Being kept in the dark about it has always, always left a bad taste in my mouth about the day.

TsukasaK: This whole thing pisses me off. You ask one goddamn question about the nature of what, precisely, happened, and you immediately become the target of "truther" ad-homs which have fark all to do with their arguments and more to do with the fact that they dared to ask a question in the first place.

/would like to have a reasonable discussion with someone on this
//sources cited, etc

The problem is, there is an entire government report on it, many articles on the science of what happened, and many specials that showed what happened and the science behind the event. I've seen many of them, and actually read a chunk of the report. Most people who have questions simply haven't done the required reading or refuse to believe the facts.

I was 18 and in my first semester of college. We were on the Terrace of the building drawing in my Design Elements class when students were just rushing past us towards the bookstore up the block. Then we heard it. A girl saw a friend leaving our building and yelled
"Dude! Someone just did a kamakazi in the World Trade Center! We're going to watch the news at the bookstore!" and she was off.

My classmates and I were stunned. We just sat there, we were still drawing but it was surreal. I remember I had a freaking seed pod in my lap and thinking "WTF, this is bullshiat..." and then our teacher dismissed us for the day. All of us in a mass herd pushed ourselves into the crowded store, and mind you our bookstore was about the size a B&N or larger, and we just watched the first tower collapse on live TV. First there were some girls who screamed in shock. Then it was dead silence. We were too shocked to do or say anything. Then my friend, who lived in the same dorm as me, pulled my arm and suggested we watch at the dorm. By the time we got back the second tower fell.

My brother at the time had his office less than 2 blocks from the Towers and my father would work at the Pentagon on alternate days. I couldn't get anyone on the phone until late that night. Thank god it was primary day because my brother and his wife were at the polls in Brooklyn and my dad left something at the office so he was late for his usual meeting w/ the DoD.

tulax: Sweaty Dynamite: dstanley: downstairs: Pearl Harbor?

What did people do on December 7, 1949?

They celebrated that the farking War had already been over for four years.

I think the question was more directed to the observation that 12/7/49 was eight years after Pearl Harbor just like today is eight years after 9/11.

And I was just pointing out that merely eight years after Pearl Harbor we had already fought and won the war.

Hey, if we cant make fun of 9/11 the terrrists have already won! they havnt won have they?

I didn't find out until after school. The teachers decided it would be good not to tell us. Because many kids had parents who worked in the buildings and it would be the last normal day they would have. For anyone who believes that 9/11 is stand alone justification for war. I beg you to find a website that helps family's who lost someone. http://www.peacefultomorrows.org/ http://www.familiesofseptember11.org/actionalert.aspx?alert_id=99 and just read the posts. Understand the cost of war. It is not one way. Everyone on those sites has an equivalent in any country we fight in. Innocents die in war. Its called collateral damage. Truly learn about it before you write it off as justifiable.

I was in Amsterdam for work on 9/11/01 and had just left the Van Gogh museum when a girl tapped me on the back at the bus stop. She asked if I was American and after my nod, she told me that something big had happened, she wasn't sure, but thought she'd heard someone blew up the White House. The four minute bus ride back to the hotel was excruciating. When I got to the hotel, I found my boss along with two Mohawk Indians (one of whose grandfather helped build the towers), and a couple of other Canadians & Americans watching the coverage - I'd missed the initial impacts, but I saw the second tower fall live.

That evening, we were supposed to do a dinner cruise on the canals as part of our conference. We thought about canceling it, but decided it would be better for all of us to be together - and these were people from all over the world. To a person, everyone was extraordinarily kind. And along the canals in Amsterdam, every single tv we could see was tuned to the coverage.

I was supposed to fly out the next day, but ended up getting the first flight out of A-dam back to the states on Saturday. I was never so happy to be on a plane - I was getting married in a few weeks and the airlines first told me the first flight they could book me on was 9/27.

To this day, my stomach gets queasy when I see or experience a plane banking a turn. I couldn't get that image/idea out of my head...that was the last thing those passengers felt...I hope.

/So grateful to everyone in Amsterdam that helped me get through those four extra days.
//And yes, of all places to be stuck, not too shabby.

TsukasaK: This whole thing pisses me off. You ask one goddamn question about the nature of what, precisely, happened, and you immediately become the target of "truther" ad-homs which have fark all to do with their arguments and more to do with the fact that they dared to ask a question in the first place.

/would like to have a reasonable discussion with someone on this
//sources cited, etc

i will have a reasonable discussion with you....but i will say it is conditional. if you would like to discuss issues framed by "this just doesn't make sense to me," we can work around that. If you're approaching it as, "No, you see, thermite and, well, aluminum isotopes of the fifth to the third flaven-glaven have not been found at any other plane crash site, nor reproduced in any laboratory before and since then...oh, and the effects of pancaking on the terminal free-fall as demonstrated by Fibonacci sequences, and quite possibly the circle of fifth from music theory..." well, then I won't.

fire away.

pd771: The problem is, there is an entire government report on it, many articles on the science of what happened, and many specials that showed what happened and the science behind the event. I've seen many of them, and actually read a chunk of the report. Most people who have questions simply haven't done the required reading or refuse to believe the facts.

Bits of that report (if you're referring to the 9/11 commission one) were later retracted, such as the original "pancaking" theory, as NIST proved in an experiment in 2004 that it was not plausible.

If you immediately dismiss someone as a "truther" and ignore anything they say, then you are just as retarded as someone who parrots conspiracy theory wharrgarbl.

Knee jerk reactions are never, ever a good thing.

NEVER...

...uh...NEVER....shiat.

NEVER something or another, I can't remember.

Ok fine, I guess I'll tell my unremarkable story, since no one is likely to read it.

I was a senior in high school, and I was talking with a friend in our first period class. An English teacher that was notorious at our school for being a total hard ass in the classroom walked in carrying a portable radio, and she looked like she was about to pass out. We didn't have a TV anywhere where we could get to it, so we just had to rely on the radio for news for the next hour.

After the class, the principal got on the PA system and instructed the students who had cars to go home and to take any younger students that we knew home, too (small private school, everyone knew everyone). On my way home, I got a call from my dad at the airport wondering why all the flights out of Memphis had been cancelled. I had dropped him off before going to school, so I had to go pick him up as well. Seeing all the FedEx planes just sitting there was so weird.

Once we got home, we immediately took all the cars to get gas, thinking that they might start rationing. The line of cars by the time we got the last car there was almost a quarter mile long.

My friend's dad is a FedEx pilot, and he regulary flew up to Boston and New York, so the first bit was really hard for my friend, not being able to see the TV to know it wasn't a FedEx plane.

Flederman: I didn't find out until after school. The teachers decided it would be good not to tell us. Because many kids had parents who worked in the buildings and it would be the last normal day they would have. For anyone who believes that 9/11 is stand alone justification for war. I beg you to find a website that helps family's who lost someone. http://www.peacefultomorrows.org/ http://www.familiesofseptember11.org/actionalert.aspx?alert_id=99 and just read the posts. Understand the cost of war. It is not one way. Everyone on those sites has an equivalent in any country we fight in. Innocents die in war. Its called collateral damage. Truly learn about it before you write it off as justifiable.

If that was an elementary school I'm surprised there wasn't a swarm of parents trying to pull their kids out early. If it was high school I'm surprised that those handful of students who had cell phones weren't called and told by someone.

Sublime_Influence: Hey, if we cant make fun of 9/11 the terrrists have already won! they havnt won have they?

Your post being the second one after Elephantman's really doesn't help your effect. I can appreciate some humor in this (for some reason, I get a kick out of Hulk Hogan), but... yeah. You kind of got farked by the timing there.

Also, you're being stupid.

Bartleby the Scrivener: i will have a reasonable discussion with you....but i will say it is conditional.

Thank you. Any chance we could talk offsite though? This could go a lot of places and I'd much rather not have it fall apart in a couple days when this thread gets archived.

TsukasaK: Bits of that report (if you're referring to the 9/11 commission one) were later retracted, such as the original "pancaking" theory, as NIST proved in an experiment in 2004 that it was not plausible

never mind.

Junior year in college. Didn't have class until 11:00. A couple minutes after 9:00 my roomate started banging on my door telling me I should come see this. I groggily stumbled out to the living room cursing at him for waking me up and rubbing the sleep from my eyes.

As I finally focused on the TV screen I remember the strange feelings I got as I recognized the scope of the situation at hand. I remember seeing and hearing only the TV, everything else in the apartment at that time was just fuzzy background. I remember the hair on my arms, legs and neck standing up and getting that strange sinking feeling in my stomach I get when I'm in a rapidly decending elevator. I remember getting alternating feelings of temperature; several minutes of being cold followed by several minutes of feeling hot, except for my head and face which remained flushed.

I remember knowing that everything had just changed.

I will remember that day forever.

Bartleby the Scrivener: TsukasaK: Bits of that report (if you're referring to the 9/11 commission one) were later retracted, such as the original "pancaking" theory, as NIST proved in an experiment in 2004 that it was not plausible

never mind.

? The hell?