Where were you …

[Blackswanwood]

… 25 yeas ago today?

I’d just started a new job and was visiting to Sydney to look at how investment platforms worked in Australia.

It was the last evening of the trip and I was in the hotel room gathering my stuff for the flight back the following day. A colleague called my room to tell me a plane had flown into the WTC in New York. I didn’t really understand what he was telling me. I switched on the tv and suddenly found I was watching the second plane hit the towers. Totally surreal.

 

[Dr.Al]

I was at Bristol University working on my PhD. A colleague from one of the comms labs came into the office to tell us about the first plane strike & we all ran up to the lab to see the TV just in time to see the second strike.

 

[Lons]

From memory I was up to my armpits in lime mortar converting a grade 2 listed stable block into a rather desireable house. Heard it on the radio but no visuals until I got home. I remember thinking it must be just a huge scam and unreal.

 

[Woodbloke]

I was working at a fairly dire job at Wilton Carpet Factory, prior to moving to the MoD. The noise of the huge carpet looms was deafening and constant, but management ordered them shut down for a two minute silence and the whole factory went quiet - Rob

 

[Distinterior]

I was fitting a kitchen about 5 mins from home, which itself was unusual, as the majority of my work at the time was usually 20+ miles away from home.

I think it was late morning/ lunch time when my then girlfriend/ now wife, rang me to ask if I had been watching the TV.....
I thought she was having some sort of mental breakdown......."Why on earth would I be watching the TV in a customer's house" I asked....???
"Just turn on the T V "she said.....And hung up!

Back in those days, I had a youg apprentice working for me and I remember telling him that from that day forward, our world would never be the same again.......

 

[Doug]

I was 2 months in to completely gutting our present home, I removed everything, so much so when the council inspector came to check it was uninhabitable on opening the front door there was a 2’ drop to soil, no plaster on the remaining walls & looking up you could see the underside of the roof tiles.
My then new to me neighbour popped round & asked if I’d heard the news, which I hadn’t, it was the first time I went in his house as I watched the re-run of the planes hitting the towers on his TV.

 

[AndyP]

Working for ICL/Fujtisu in Footscray Kent. We lost our inter-company communications very early on but were able to huddle around a TV to watch the events unfold. Missus was at home in bed with our first born totally oblivious until I got home that evening.

 

[MattS]

I’m not one for remembering where I was when significant events happened but this one sticks in my mind even though it was so mundane. I’d been out somewhere with friends, it was just before I went off to uni. Mum was ironing and had the TV on, remember standing in the hallway door not quite able to belief what I was seeing.

 

[Cabinetman]

The image will never leave me of the plane hitting the tower. News released 2 days ago that virtually every sample of the dust from the clean up contained Asbestos, there have been a lot of deaths amongst the people having to deal with the aftermath, what a terrible thing to have to face.

 

[AndyT]

I was in a big office in Bristol, full of separate teams with very little to do with each other.

There was one TV, belonging to a Press team. As the word went round the building about the first hit, we all crowded in, watching the scene on repeat.

Then the second hit came and we collectively realised how the world had just shifted and would never be the same again.

 

[Pete Maddex]

It was a day of massive change for the whole world.

I was at work at Nottingham Trent university the internet was very slow but we had a tv to watch the events unfolding.

Pete

 

[GaryR]

I was standing in front of an auditorium of about 100 biology students about to start the day's lecture. A few of the students filing in said something about a plane hitting a building in New York but I had no idea what they were talking about and went on with the lecture. Of course by the time lecture was over, the entire campus knew.

 

[RogerS]

I was in a cab in London IIRC

 

[SamQ aka Ah! Q!]

In Biology Lab 3, preparing stuff for the impending new term, my technician came running in, "switch on the telly!". My colleague Michael, newly returned from his stateside holiday (including the viewing gallery high up in the W.T.C.) just stood there, staring at the T.V., endlessly repeating "I was there...just a week ago...I was there". I was as struck by his deep shock as I was by the unfolding events.

 

[AJB Temple]

I was at home in the UK. CEO of an airline catering air side supply business, supplying mainly US airlines in the main intercontinental hubs, and my Dutch girlfriend was in NY in my flat a block away from WTC. I watched on TV the second plane go in, and immediately was on the phone to the office to cancel all in/out US orders followed by checking on her. It was the most shocking day of my life. She was stuck there for 8 days.

It changed the world, it changed air travel, changed us, and I got out of that business the following year.

 

[Gill]

I was at home, slurping a cuppa and decided to put the news channel on out of sheer boredom. I saw the second plane go into the tower and thought, “That’ll piss off the Americans”. Then I went back to my ironing. I thought nothing more of it because the news channels show that sort of stuff from all around the world so often. I didn’t see its relevance to me in Britain and, to be honest, I still see it as one of those events that punctuate our times before we move onto something else. I put it behind me as soon as I grabbed His Lordship’s shirt out the laundry basket.