House of Eratosthenes

Sitting at my desk in a basement office. I heard about it over instant messenger from a friend 130 miles away.

Mark: “Oh my God, an airplane just crashed into the World Trade Center.”
Me: “Like a little airplane?”
Mark: “No, like a commercial jet. Oh my God, I’m watching it now.”
Me: “Crap. That was no accident.”

Moments later, he IM’ed me that a second plane just hit. He watched it live.

I wonder how many Americans actually knew who Osama Bin Laden was before that? I did. I suspected his hand right off the bat.

I remember all the news sites were locked up within minutes as people tried to find out more.
- philmon | 09/11/2009 @ 09:00
Coming up out of the BART station at Montgomery Street in SFO… at oh-dark-thirty, 0545 hrs, actually. Stopped in Starbucks to get my first coffee of the morning. Guy walks in and loudly announces “someone just flew a plane into the WTC in New York.” No one believes him. He swears it’s true. I go up to my place of bid’niz and have my night-shift guys switch our large monitoring screen to CNN. Moments later we watch the second airliner hit…

Pretty much a blur after that. We implemented our disaster recovery plan and sent all key ops personnel to our alternate operations location in a hardened data center… except for myself (director of Site Ops), the VP of operations and one engineer… who remained in the high-rise at 44 Montgomery. We sent all non-essential folks who showed up for work home. The remainder of the day was quite an edgy experience, as NO ONE knew if there would be follow-on coordinated attacks in other cities. We didn’t get a whole helluva lot of work done, either.
- bpenni | 09/11/2009 @ 11:40
[…] it without you! It seems like everyone is talking about it. In Jennifer’s Head Life in 3D Morgan Freeberg Larry Correia David Hardy Ron Zack There are many others, too. I’m going to bow to them this […]
- Evyl Robot Soapbox | The Rantings of a Complex Piece of Hardware | 09/11/2009 @ 11:44
Golly, I was in a holistic-ish alcohol rehab in Arizona.
Someone who was watching the early morning news-(2 hour time zone thing) zombie-walked out to my calm morning ritual of coffee, cigarette, and newspaper, and casually announce the first impact.

Naturally, with doubt, I went in to see what the fuss was all about.
While sitting there with an expected “Oh SHIT!” aura about me I watched as the second plane hit.

My GF and I both have professional and personal ties to Manhattan. In her case ex In-laws as well. In my case, financial stuff also based in the WTC. I called her in New Hampshire, as life suddenly changed for both of us for a multitude of reasons, and just said “Turn on the Tee Vee”.
Naturally, she asked “Um..why, and which channel?”

All I could muster was… “Any of them”.

My first instinct was along the same sentiments of “Let’s Roll”. I think I may even have instinctively rolled up my shirt sleeves. Yeah, I’m one of THOSE kind of men.

It quickly became apparent that I wasn’t flying to ANYWHERE anytime soon,
I couldn’t rent a car without a valid drivers license (did I mention an ETOH rehab?), and I was stranded in a town of (strangely wealthy) crystal, “vortex”, pan flute, and non-competition film festival worshipers.

By noon (EDT) the futility of my situation was clear. All I could do was was offer up satellite phone connections to my few like minded captives, and get on with my “healing”, in the libertarian hell known as Sedona.
- CaptDMO | 09/12/2009 @ 09:18
In a car on my way to work, in the predawn darkness, moving along in very heavy traffic. Got the news about the first plane on the car radio, likewise with the 2nd. With the first, I figured some tool in a Cessna had gotten drunk and slammed into the building. The second collision removed all doubt.

Was at my job at the drugstore when word came that the first tower had collapsed, then the second, and then that a plane had crashed in PA. It seemed like the whole world was under attack. I remember wishing that my boss would close the store and send everyone home; there was talk of the CHP shutting down the freeways and I wanted to get home before that happened.

Bloodthirsty savages. As my dad put it, “At least the Japanese went after a military target, instead of an office building full of (innocent) people trying to do their jobs.” What struck me was that not only could these animals never build something like the World Trade Center, they couldn’t even destroy it without commandeering something else we had invented. Their 1993 car bomb didn’t exactly do the job.

Say, didja hear the news that Osama bin Laden thinks that Barack Obama is “weak?” Funny how terrorists, murderers, and despots often have these Democrats pegged, while our own media sputter and yawn.
- cylarz | 09/15/2009 @ 02:06
[…] PEEK IN THE WELL– 9/11 Plus Eight …. […]
- Steynian 383 « Free Canuckistan! | 09/15/2009 @ 05:51

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9/11 Plus EightFriday, September 11th, 2009

9/11 Plus Eight
Friday, September 11th, 2009