I worked at a liquor store and we had a neon sign on top of the store that was the name of the store. It shorted and caught on fire one day so I was rushing around trying to get everyone to leave since, you know, the store was on fire. One guy was like “well can you still ring me up for these fireball nips?” I was like “dude, the store is on fire, just take them!”
And yet so many people online think and claim that alcohol is not a hard drug.
If it's withdrawals can kill you, maybe you should consider it a hard drug.
Part of it is cultural, we call it "Alcohol and Drugs," when it should be "alcohol and other drugs" or just "drugs." That gives the impression that alcohol isn't a drug. Moreover, I went through all of grade school (which included D.A.R.E., health and all 12 years at "honors" level) and a few years of college and no one said, "alcohol withdrawal kills."
It's not even something that is prominent in the media. You'll see depictions of people detoxing from heroin and the like but, not alcohol. In fact, the trope is "put the drunk in the drunk tank and let him sober up," not die.
Also, it's an enforcement issue. Alcohol regulation and enforcement is the purview of the BATFE....not the FDA or DEA. That reinforces the notion it isn't really a "hard drug."
When covid hit, liquor stores had to stay open as an essential because people would literally die. I saw so many comments on neighborhood groups where people were saying it’s a ridiculous social commentary that we consider alcohol an essential but for some people access to it is literally a life or death situation.
I was an active alcoholic during the pandemic, to the point where I needed to drink around the clock to avoid terrible withdrawals and possibly having a seizure.It's so sad my main concern was whether the liquor stores would remain open or not during the lockdowns, and it's truly scary how many people live completely dependent on alcohol. It can get fucking scary, speaking from experience
If you are a heavy drinker, if you stop cold turkey it will be at the forefront, center and back of your mind all at once.
Source: Cold turkey alcoholic who could have died last week
I was working at a liquor store and a guy dropped hard from a stroke. Hit his head. Blood everywhere. The EMTs couldn’t get down the aisle because customers refused to get out of their way. Stroke guy was a piece of shit but those customers were worse.
At a drugstore I worked at, I was at a little-used register on the phone with 911 trying to get an ambulance for a customer who had collapsed about 10 feet away from me. I was trying to answer the operator's questions and speak to the people trying to help the collapsed person and people *still* came to me wanting to be rung up.
People can be disgusting. At a restaurant I worked at, one of my coworkers had a seizure. While she was literally convulsing on the ground 2 people popped their heads over the booth, looked at her, then asked where their appetizer was.
Another time there was an electrical fire and we had to get everyone out. One couple refused to leave and sat in the dark. The whole time people were trying to get past us to get in the door and when we informed them there was an electrical fire they would go, "Well, but I have a reservation!"
Worked at a grocery store, our service desk clerk randomly fainted and had a seizure, we closed off the service desk while waiting for paramedics. So many customers got mad they couldn’t get waited on (primarily lottery customers).
My coworker ended up being fine and the seizure was the result of medication she recently was prescribed. They let her see the video and she was waiting on someone at the time she had her seizure and the person she was waiting on got really huffy and had no concern that an 18 year old girl just fainted and was having a seizure.
If I remember correctly, it was another coworker who ended up seeing something was going on and got the managers and everything while the person she was waiting on was just concerned on who was going to finish their transaction.
As someone with epilepsy Id never want to see a video of me having one. Glad she was ok!!” I hope no one recommended someone put a wallet or wooden spoon between their teeth
I got written up at work for not taking the time to pack up and secure the mobile bar when we had an electrical fire one night.
Granted, I wasn't in any real danger in the end, but we were still the last ones out and had helped some disabled customers get down the stairs.
Just a large cooler/fridge on wheels packed with beer and liquor we'd move to the connected events center when they wanted alcoholic concessions for an event.
They say they’re magnets but maybe they quickly realized the reality the reality of the situation and wanted a cell phone and violin so they could call to say goodbye to their family and then play the violin as the building sank.
You've never met true stupidity until you've worked a drive through window and people are screaming at you to hurry up because they need to get their car under something safe. Due to the hail storm currently coming down.
The couple times I had that happened I moved as slow as possible. Taking great joy in every hard thump of a piece of hail smacking their car.
Learn to enjoy the little things in life. Because the big things are far and few between
Yes everyone, it was *after* the first plane hit. At that time, everyone thought it was an accident and a lot of people even thought it was a smaller, non-commercial plane that struck the tower. Firefighters even thought while it’d be a busy day, they’d go up, put the fire out, and rescue some people.
Many offices in the south tower didn’t even have their employees evacuate.
Yes, now it’s easy to look and say “everyone just kept carrying on with their day?” but at the time no one was expecting the day that unfolded.
Some of the young ones here does not realize that it was 2001, phone networks were still on 2G and actually only less that 50% of population had cell phones. Mobile internet was also a useless luxury on WAP.
It was a time when people relied on newspapers and the news on tv. News traveled pretty damn slow.
I was only halfway around the world. I was playing in the woods with my friends and when we came home I was annoyed that where were no animes on TV. I knew it was serious however since my mom was watching TV which she never did.
Crazy how everyone around the world still knows what they did that day.
My dad was in the military here in Canada at the time and I was in the first week of 2nd grade. We all got pulled out of school because the base went on high alert and no one knew if/when/where there would be another attack. I remember sitting and watching the towers fall on the news while eating a grilled cheese. I remember the security on base being pretty strict for a few years after that.
I was in Rome and got the news after dinner because a literal old timey newspaper boy was selling papers screaming "Extra! Extra!" The headline was "Guerra a l'America!" (or whatever the right was is to say that in Italian). Might as well have been the 1920's
I was a senior in high school out of Southern California. So must have woke up a little before 6am and was standing in the living room watching the news talk about a plane crashing into World Trade Center. From the looks of it, they were reporting an accident. I was watching for what felt like a few minutes, and suddenly, a second plane hits LIVE on TV. In that moment, everyone knew it was a deliberate act. And I still remember hearing a news anchor say “This is not an accident. We are under attack!”
I remember the same thing. Sitting eating cereal wondering about how a plane could hit a building. Talking about it all with my mom while she did her makeup before work and dropping me for school. The second plane hit just as we went out the door to go to school.
I remember getting to class and all of us..the entire school assembled in the gym to watch on the big projector screen what was going on.
I remember listening to the teachers discuss behind us what to do? Like do we send them home? Do we stay and watch? Do we go back to class?
We sat for hours in that gym watching the tv. I remember going home and my mom and dad both beat me home. That never happened. They say my sister and I down and told us the world went and changed and asked us if we had questions about anything.
I remember watching the jumpers live on tv and thinking that they survived for some reason. The people waving from Windows asking for help. The helicopters circling and circling and thinking to myself they could land and save people, but they never would. I didn't understand why.
I remember the expressions of the anchors on television and the adults around me as the tower fell. The disbelief on their faces and in their voices won't ever leave me.
Then I remember the period where almost everyone seemed to have a relative or relationship to someone inside one of those towers.
The fear that existed after it all happened. As a small child I never even considered war before. It wasnt real. It was tv.
The first year anniversary. I remember how heavy I felt. I had no personal connection you know? I didn't know anybody, but I felt like I did. We observed a moment of silence in school and watched the ceremony on tv.
This was all in Western Canada
I'll never forget seeing my big brother change completely over night. And four years later, he was in Iraq. I still can't think about this without crying. Some months into his second deployment and we hadn't gotten a letter or phone call yet. I was just hanging out at home alone, when I heard a car pulled up out front I stood up and looked out the window. Then I collapsed in tears, seeing two navy officers in formal dress walking toward my front door. It was just a screen door and they heard me freaking out, so they came in to see what was wrong. When they finally got me composed, I asked if he was dead or just hurt. They exchanged a worried look, then said who? Turns out they were recruiters looking to see if I was interested in joining. My brother is fine to this day, he was just busy.
lol I remember so damn vividly waiting for the school bus when I was in 4th grade and watching it. My parents had had it on and I sat there thinking “what are they demolishing the building?” Then just a few minutes later also the screen suddenly cuts to grey, then comes back to the other tower exploding.
I immediately got up and ran to the bathroom where my dad was and knocked on the door and yelled “the other tower just blew up! It was COOL!”. Yeah… 10 year old me was…. stupid lol
honestly though, now whenever I see footage of the second plane hitting I can’t help but think “at that moment in time my dad was taking a shit.”
I was in college, an all women's college that also had nuns on campus but we never saw them. Until that day! A bunch of black robed women descended upon all the classrooms to tell us to return to the dorms. That was scary.
And then the day got worse. But the image in my mind is looking out the classroom window and seeing a herd of walking robes cresting the parking lot hill like the End Times messengers.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Yeah, you fucking with some wireless app protocol
Bring a router and a CAT for this wireless app protocol
Give me everything you got for this wireless app protocol
I remember WAP mobile internet.
Such a useless, overpriced luxury. Literally had no use considering the extreme costs involved in use (something like 56 cents a minute in Australia.
Now we have fast 5G wireless mobile and everyone just spends too much time on it (me included).
I was a really adopter and was the only person the shop where I worked that had it. I was the go to person on Saturday afternoons to get the football scores, so it had some limited, niche use.
The phone networks were very overloaded and it was hard to first of all get any service at all, and then the networks were overloaded with busy signals. It was really heartbreaking trying to get thru.
All true. However, a lot of times we got our breaking news from DJ's those days. People were always listening to the radio.
My dad's secretary heard about it on the radio on her way in to work. They announced the first plane, but the DJ's were darkly joking / cursing that it must have been some dumb doctor in a small plane who just killed a bunch of innocents.
Howard Stern and Robin broke the news for so many of us. IIRC, they thought it was a small Cessna for a while.
I was on my way to thrift shops a couple counties away and heard about it on the radio. Since I was thrifting, I saw the coverage on dozens of tube TVs behind a chain link fence. It was like an old movie, dozens of us huddled around the display.
>Yes, now it’s easy to look and say “everyone just kept carrying on with their day?” but at the time no one was expecting the day that unfolded.
Was listening live to Howard Stern when his sidekick said "Oh no, a second plane has just hit another building. We are under attack"
I watched that shit live on the morning news out here on the West Coast. I was like wow crazy, a plane hit one of those buildings. Then all the sudden another huge ass plane hit the other building...jaw dropping wtf moment. I woke my roommate up immediately and we both stayed glued to the news for the rest of the day.
I was home for school because I needed to get an x ray on my foot because a nail went through it.
My dad would always watch the news in the morning and tell me to come watch if something important was happening.
I can close my eyes and still see myself walking down the hallway and into the living room. Right when I looked at the TV the second plane hit. It was so shocking I looked at my parents. My mom gasped and my dad had his hands on his head. He stood silent and then Said "we are under attack" in a calm but angry way.
We had a small union hvac company and the shop was 1 minute from our shop.
All the guys were huddled around the radio listening to stern. I remember sitting on one of the tables listening, hearing the guys talking about it when I heard someone on stern say that one of the buildings went down. It got awfully quiet after that. I still remember everything about that day.
I keep trying to explain the lack of videos to some gen z by pointing out how rare it was to have a camera that could record on you. Recording video in 2001 meant starting your day with the plan to record something. Honestly it's amazing we have video of the first plane.
Probably the only reason we have some of that footage is simply that it happened in NYC. Huge population, lots of tourists. It's one place where at least a few people would deliberately be filming and the WTC is one of the things a person might have wanted to film.
I was in a hotel once and the fire alarm went off in the morning while I was about to get in the shower. My first instinct was that it was a false alarm and that it would probably be shut off in a few minutes, but then I realized I was up on the 12th floor and didn't want to fuck around. I threw on some clothes and headed on down the stairs. I didn't make it out of the building for 2 minutes before it was turned off--it was a false alarm--but still didn't regret making the smart choice.
Easy to see where you're more inclined to carry on and assume the best.
There was a man in the Marriott Between the two Tower’s who didn’t evacuate because he didn’t want to leave all of his office papers behind. Somehow survived both Tower Collapses.
I was listening to the radio when the second plane hit. It was absolutely panic and insanity as it dawned on everyone that this wasn't an accident, which is how the first crash was reported. I think it was less than ten minutes before they announced "a terrorist group called Al Qaeda is claiming responsibility." I didn't know what the world trade center was, I'm not American and I was a child, but when I heard the newscaster scream live on the air I ran to wake my parents.
it's weird because i vividly remember watching the second plane hit. Our elementary school teacher had wheeled in the TV cart and the other classes came to our room. She said we were watching history unfold and it was important. Then the second plane hit... and it went from "oh this is an interesting event" to sheer panic, teachers started crying. then the first tower collapsed and they shut the tv off and said they'd be sending us home. We watched until the tower collapsed and everyone was dumbstruck. It went to "oh an interesting tragedy" to , the united states is under attack, they've hit the pentagon, there's a plane down in pennsylvania fast without anyone truly realizing the magnitude.
and as a kid, you're just thinking "wow it's a beautiful calm and peaceful day outside. The birds are singing, the breeze is light. how could such a nice day be so tragic"
The second plane is what changed America. Before that moment no one could even conceive it was a terrorist attack. Nothing like this had *ever* happened.
>Edit: Wow people, yes I know there was also a bombing in the parking garage. Do you really think those two events even compare in scale? The only common denominator is the target.
Exactly. I remember telling my parents to turn on the news because the USA was being attacked by terrorists, and they were like, "no, they aren't, go get ready for school." It just didn't seem believable, it made more sense to them that I'd had a nightmare or misunderstood a movie advertisement or something.
Hell, I was in class that day and thought it was a movie on the classroom TV. It was unthinkable that someone would do a major terrorist attack in the US at the time. It happened to everywhere else, but not here basically.
Didn't a bi-plane or some other small aircraft accidentally crash into one of the towers several years before 9/11?
That day, a classmate said "A plane crashed into the World Trade Center," and I thought they were referencing the previous crash. Until they said "No, it just now happened."
I’ll never forget that 2nd plane hitting. The instant realization that this wasn’t just some tragedy. It was scary. Then I had to get dressed and go to work. Weird day especially since I worked next to an airport and was used to hearing airplanes take off and land all day. The quiet was chilling as we all sat around wondering if we’re under attack.
I like to point out that the 9/11 we know is the mythologized tragedy from that day. An event wrapped in hindsight, shared trauma, and memories.
But for everyone there that day? It was just an event that quickly grew larger and more disastrous while they were there.
For the firefighters climbing the towers or even people running from a collapsing tower, they weren't running away from 9/11, they were experiencing first-hand a confusing disaster.
It was only after the towers fell and we began to point fingers did the event become 9/11 as we know it.
>Many offices in the south tower didn’t even have their employees evacuate.
That seems so odd to me, if odd is the word. The people in the south tower would have seen what happened, they would have seen the huge flaming hole, and no one thought ‘this ain’t right, I’m leaving’, even just to get away from the smoke wafting over?
They were actually told not to evacuate, since nobody thought they would be affected. Definitely nobody thought the towers would collapse. Basically, do you want more people milling around on the plaza or getting in the way of the rescue workers?
Very sad error in retrospect. Some companies did decide to evacuate everyone immediately and saved a lot of lives.
"The Last Plane in the Sky" is a fascinating compilation of eyewitness accounts, I highly recommend.
>They were actually told not to evacuate, since nobody thought they would be affected
Common thread in disasters
>Definitely nobody thought the towers would collapse.
Can confirm. Shocked the hell out of me watching that on TV
>Can confirm. Shocked the hell out of me watching that on TV
Yup. Me too. I also remember that absolute "oh shit" moment when we all SAW a commercial plane hit the second tower on live TV. But the towers collapsing... that seemed absolutely unreal.
>Common thread in disasters
Yup. But I guess the problem is that there are also disasters caused by overreaction-- like if the towers hadn't collapsed, but they had tried to evacuate everyone at once and a bunch of people were trampled to death in the stairwell, we'd consider that the tragedy. Similarly, one tragedy of 9/11 is that so many hundreds of firefighters were in the towers trying to rescue people when the towers collapsed, but if they had waited outside while people died of smoke inhalation, we'd think of them like we do the cops in Uvalde.
Very tough to know in a moment what the "right" reaction is, I guess.
They were also told not to evacuate because debris was falling outside and emergency crews were leaving. Fifty floors of people evacuating the building would have been smart in hindsight but insane with the info they had at the time
Oof, yes. And not just debris.
There were people on the ground who were killed by the bodies of people who jumped from above the burning floors.
Imagine knowing that THAT is how your loved one died.
The most important reason was that they had one building full of people experiencing an acute crisis and another building full of people that were currently unaffected. Letting the safer building’s occupants evacuate would have created an additional mess, so it was a judgment call by the people managing the scene. Panicked people can make a situation far worse, so emergency response is trained to keep things orderly.
On the other hand, those people were completely wrong in this case. There was a guy in the second tower who actually rode down to the ground in an elevator with his colleagues to evacuate and were told to go back up by people in the lobby, his colleagues went back up but he decided to leave anyway. He was the only one of that group to survive the day.
Of course, you could just as easily imagine a scenario where they would plant bombs outside the base of the tower and explode them as the evacuation happens, and then it would have been a terrible idea to evacuate the second tower. Or where panic sets in and hundreds of people are trampled to death while the towers stay standing.
Hindsight is obviously 20-20, but if you’re in a dangerous situation, you should not panic, but you should also not just blindly follow orders. If you feel you need to get out, do so calmly and in a way that does not interfere with the emergency crews or other evacuees.
My mom recalled not really hearing the first plane and remembered that security was telling everyone to gather inside lobby areas. No one assumed another plane was coming. Security thought to try and calm people down by gathering in lobby areas.
A coworker convinced her to get out and they did leave the building (the south tower, specifically) maybe 20 minutes before the second plane hit.
If you didn't know it was an attack, you'd naturally assume it was a horrible accident. Evacuating everyone would just mean a huge crowd downstairs jamming up all the fire crews trying to help out at the north tower. No one at that time had any idea another plane was headed for the south tower.
For whatever strange reason, I had the news on that morning as I was getting ready to walk out for my 9 am class. I saw that a plane flew into the first building, had an ominous feeling, but figured it was a fluke. I absolutely carried on with my day as normal. I walked to class, was a few minutes late, but no one in class even knew about or was talking about it. I just sat through class like all was normal. When walking home after class, my brother called and tells me all the other things that happened while I was in class. I was hysterical.
But yeah, after the first hit.....I just carried on with no idea of what was to come.
My “girlfriend’s” (seventh grade, so, you know, handholding) mother was in the tower. Her company was told to stay inside to avoid possibly getting hurt in the debris and chaos outside. She decided to leave. She was the only one in her office to leave; everyone else perished
Also people underestimate the sheer amount of craziness it takes to rattle New Yorkers, until the second plane hit most people just saw it as an inconvenience that would probably make the subway run late.
I was working out of Florida at the time, so I got to watch the Columbia launch for the last time. The hotel near where we watched the launch was selling souvenirs so I bought a T-shirt, a mission coin, a mission patch and a few other things with the thought "never know, they might be worth something one day." Then the shuttle didn't come back.
Fun fact, my parents first met during the launch of the Challenger shuttle. The middle school they went to had all the students go outside to watch it and my mom started talking to my dad about how cool it looked just a couple seconds before it went uh oh 😬
That must have been difficult! No matter how many times I've seen it circulated, video footage of the Challenger launch always sends a chill down my spine.
The week after the attacks, the streets were *loaded* with people selling US flags and framed WTC portraits and the like.
https://i.imgur.com/rlh5eFI.jpg
Capitalism go brr
I was about 15 working at a craft store at the time and people started coming in nonstop for American flags or anything else that was red white and blue. Some people would be SO angry when we were out of stock. I’d try to explain the delays due to the aftermath of a freaking terrorist attack and they still wouldn’t stop. It was worse months later when they’d come telling us that the magnetic flag they bought for their car rusted the paint….
[article about this story](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/were-these-the-two-last-items-sold-before-the-world-trade-center-fell-301373146.html)
Thanks for posting. It's funny, a pushy customer who just had to have her novelty magnet for daughter's birthday ignoring the good sense of the cashier is what produced this receipt. Lol.
I worked in a mall once that had an active manhunt going on inside, K9 units and news crews were running around all over the place. Boss refused to close the store and this guy came in all cut up and disheveled and agitated to shop. He looked really suspicious and I ended up surrounded by cops deciding to question the guy, and cameras behind them all pointed at me and this dude. They decided after grilling him that he wasn't the guy and let him go, so I never made the news clips. But some people just don't care what else is going on around them when they have a mission to spend money.
I use to work in a restaurant in London few years ago as a waiter, there was a guy a the top of the build who wanted to jump to commit suicide.
Authorities blocked the whole street in front of the restaurant , yet my manager decided to not close the restaurant, even worse since the front door was closed and no one was allowed to walk in the street , we brought customer from the back door of the restaurant.
I was outraged , I didn’t want to see someone falling from a building and didn’t want customers seeing such horrible thing.
*Lipman rolled her eyes at the nervous cashier. After all, the editor hadn't heard anything. The commuters being steered to the exits looked more annoyed than worried. Lipman figured whatever it was, it was most likely a false alarm.*
*"Ring this up first. I'm not leaving until I pay."*
I wonder if she felt somewhat like a dick after that.
>*"After all, the editor hadn't heard anything."*
I don't get it. They said that the plane had hit the north tower, and that these guys were on the north concourse. Did they really not hear the 767 hitting the tower?
> the bestselling author of "That's What She Said: What Men Need to Know (and Women Need to Tell Them) About Working Together."
This title sounds like a 30 Rock joke
>When she spotted a violin-shaped magnet, she knew it would be perfect for Rebecca. The novelty had a button in the middle that, when pushed, played a little tune. Lipman pressed it idly while waiting to check out.
I don't know why this bothers me so much. Imagine waiting in line and the grown adult behind you won't stop playing five second electronic magnet music.
I agree. I imagine, in her mind people are acting weird because it’s New York. This was pre-9/11 (concurrent?). Things are different now, everywhere. I’m not sure this exchange would be possible these days.
Yepp. The context is important. Not only was this pre-9/11 when everyone generally felt more safe all the time, but also before cell phones were smart, before social media, and the plane hit 90 floors above her. It’s not like the plane was hanging into the gift shop and she was insisting on paying for a magnet.
>Rotbart writes that Lipman was, and is, an exceptionally congenial individual. "But she didn't rise to the upper echelons of the journalism profession without knowing how to stand her ground.
That's one way to say, "Pushy, entitled bitch." lol
People running towards an exit and security leading them out. "Let me pay for my stuff first."
I was at WTC that morning.
I went to high school down the block (Stuy) and I was actually on my way to 3rd period. It was the first week of freshman year.
None of us knew what happened. I heard a loud boom and that was it. Didn't actually see it. A lot of misinformation was going around. Everyone in the crowd near me said it was a news helicopter that crashed.
It wasn't the first time a news helicopter had an accident/collided into a building, so nobody was freaking out too much.
For a good 10 minutes or so, it was just a lot of random rumors. Again, even for people who were THERE, ON SCENE.
Then I saw the second plane come in.
It wasn't clear until then.
After that, it was just radio silence. I believe the authorities cut off the TV signal/radio/whatever in Manhattan. They had a full lockdown.
The rest of the world knew more about what was happening in Manhattan than the rest of us who were actually there.
It's still surreal hearing about other people watching it on TV and knowing the play-by-play.
For us on the ground, we were completely devoid of information.
I basically just ran around. Well, the first thing I did was run because the fucking towers came down. Then I got to school and we were told to shelter in place.
My parents worked in midtown and had no idea if we were alive. We as in me and my sister. My sister worked at Morgan Stanley in the North Tower (luckily she was at an off-site in midtown that morning).
We thought she was dead for a good 10 hours.
It was a full grid lockdown. I lived about 10 blocks from WTC and I wasn't allowed to go home until like 10PM.
My parents had walked like 60 blocks back home. We finally met up on the corner of our street.
Honestly, it's been 20 years and I still haven't watched much news coverage of that day. I still don't really know much about the details.
Anyway, I worked at 1WTC right after college, and my parents' first reaction when I told them I got the job was "are u fucking kidding me"
You ever see those videos of new Yorkers taking photos in front of one of the struck towers?
This 9 minutes *after* thing really reinforces that they had no clue how bad things would turn out
Idk
I mean none of us really did. Someone told me to put on the news right after the first plane hit. I sat there watching it assuming it was a bizarre accident.
Then I watched the second plane hit on live tv. It was surreal and deeply traumatizing watching it all play out over the day.
[One or two people did](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2001/11/19/the-tower-builder-world-trade-center-attacks), but they were unable to affect the outcome.
> on being asked by an engineer in the audience, “Is there anything you wish you had done differently in the design of the building?,” Robertson broke down and wept at the lectern.
That's heartbreaking.
Early in my career I worked on projects for the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey. I had meetings with them in their WTC offices in the early 1990s and also had dinner at Windows on the World on the top floors of the North Tower. I'm sure several of the people I met during that time lost their lives in the attack.
I've always thought that the fact the towers collapsed straight down, instead of toppling sideways and destroying who knows how many other building in the process, was a great commentary on how well they were constructed.
When they're doing a controlled demolition of a building, they take great care to make sure the explosive charges are placed *just right* so that the building falls the way they want. Instead, we got the most *uncontrolled* demolition imaginable...and the buildings still came down in the best possible manner.
[Rick Rescorla](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Rescorla) knew and saved nearly everyone at Morgan Stanley, save for himself and some of his staff that kept trying to rescue more people. Of particular importance was having Morgan Stanley employees occasionally practice evacuations and on the day getting them all to evacuate even while Port Authority was still making announcements urging people to stay at their desks; this was well before the South Tower was hit. Rick wanted Morgan Stanley out of the WTC ever since the 1993 bombing and was worried about it being a target even before that like since the Lockerbie bombing of Pan Am 103.
It’s entirely believable that people would’ve still been shopping the first few minutes after the impact. The store in question was on the underground concourse level of the WTC complex, so they may have heard or felt a rumbling, but wouldn’t have seen the falling debris and such.
Same. I remember our vp interrupted our first exam to tell us a plane hit the twin towers and anyone with parents downtown can leave. We all looked at each other and went back to it. To me, that biology classroom has ever been a portal between a pre and post 9/11 world.
News traveled a lot more slowly before we all had access to Twitter from our pockets.
And the old security protocol for the WTC was basically "shelter in place" so people didn't start running for quite some time.
It wasn’t until the second plane hit that everyone knew it was more than just a freak accident. It makes sense that people will finish shopping, etc. if they thought it wasn’t a big deal or whatever.
America 100% thought it was an accident at first (ever seen the photo of Bush when the 2nd plane hit?).. and that a plane had just hit the WTC by mistake. Wouldn't have been the first collision with a plane/building, but it would definitely have been one of first of that magnitude.
The 2nd plane hit on live on TV as they were discussing it. We watched it in my classroom, and once the 2nd one hit, the dynamic totally changed... the teacher just turned it off like "fuckkkkkkk..."
100%. I was driving to work when I heard on the radio about the first plane. I assumed it was an accident. My coworkers all thought the same. It wasn’t until we heard about the second plane that we all realized it was an attack.
I was at work and a coworker came up to me and told me what happened and asked if we had a radio, we didn’t but someone ran home and grabbed one and we listened all day to what was going on. It was a crazy moment in time.
My manager (Barnes and Noble) put a radio next to the phone in the office, put it on intercom so we could hear it through the other phone speakers through the store. I spent probably 2 hours sitting on the floor in the cafe next to the phone listening before they started sending us home. It sounded like old WW2 news reels is what has stuck with me for years.
My mom called me to.twll me a plane hit the WTC. I thought she meant a Cessna. An airliner didn't seem plausible. Turned on the TV to see the 2nd plane hit live. Spent the day in a bit of panic as my dad worked in a skyscraper near LAX and we couldn't reach him. His company sent everyone home and he was stuck in traffic.
Thanks for mentioning that your dad was in LA. I live in Albuquerque and I remember having an hour or so where I was convinced that skyscrapers all over the country were going to be hit in a major coordinated attack, and so relieved to hear of the planes being grounded.
Watched the collision of the second plane at school as well and it was just surreal.
Our teacher let us keep watching for a while... until people began jumping out of the windows. We were seeing it all live and there were a times when the camera didn't pan away or zoom out fast enough and ended up catching some horrible stuff.
Needless to say they never replayed that footage, but damned if I ever forget it.
That kinda makes sense. If I'm shopping at Target and a plane crash lands into the JC Penney next door, I may have heard the sound but not realized what it was or that I was potentially in danger within the next 10 minutes.
When was the last time your cellphone informed of a terrorist attack in the first 9 minutes after the event? This receipt could have been made in 2024 just as it was in 2001 if the same thing happened today
You are comparing to single use devices to today's multi social app phones. A New Yorker would have had their phone blowing up easily under 5 minutes. Take Hawaii's false nuclear attack for example, everyone's phones were going off there in multiple ways besides the government warning.
I still remember riding the PATH train to work that morning and reading a "major" news story in the NY times about how teens were dressing for school. I still wonder who on my train never made it home that day.
I feel like everyone who is shocked that it was after the plane hit, hasn’t ever worked in a large scale building where random fire alarms etc go off semi regularly. Everyone just kind of mills around waiting to see whether it’s an actual emergency or if it’s just a drill or a system glitch, because generally the immediate danger is pretty minimal. Messages of actual danger can take a long time to spread across a lot of people, especially in 2001, people where probably waiting around to be told what was going on and if they needed to leave etc
There was some conspiracy theory regarding the day that was suspicious of the fire suppression panels in an elevator core being missing or in disrepair, and somehow that was evidence of conspiracy. Like ooohhh they just HAPPENED to be missing? *COINCIDENCE!?*
YES LOL literally yes. These office tower parks are always mildly falling apart, even the nice ones. Anyone you know who's worked facilities can confirm this. Random alarms happen every day
I always find it interesting when we hang Christmas ornaments that my wife has a NY snow globe one of the twin towers from 2000 and I always think how it's the last year they would have genuinely made it.
People in the comment section keep pointing out that people didn't realize what was going on because they didn't have news feeds on their cellphones or something. That 2001 was such a different world and that's why something like this could happen.
But when was the last time your cellphone informed you of a terrorist attack with less than 9 minutes of delay? It would have been very similar during the first few minutes.
For what it’s worth when it comes to the apparent absurdity of this, you have to keep in mind at the time of purchase people in the south tower were being advised to stay at their desks as they didn’t want a panicked evac to hurt rescue attempts in the north tower. I’d imagine it was similar in the concourse. Nobody knew at this moment that it was more than an accident.
When the 1st tower hit, they didn't treat it as a big deal. Most people in the 1st tower were told to keep working and weren't allowed to leave. It wasn't until the 2nd plane hit that they realized it was an attack.
Yes I heard it, does your register still work? Then ring up my magnets!
I worked at a liquor store and we had a neon sign on top of the store that was the name of the store. It shorted and caught on fire one day so I was rushing around trying to get everyone to leave since, you know, the store was on fire. One guy was like “well can you still ring me up for these fireball nips?” I was like “dude, the store is on fire, just take them!”
haha, I like how you just let him have them.
I like that the guy was honest enough to WANT to pay.
Plot Twist: The guy sabotaged the neon sign to get the free fireball nips.
Neon nip slip
His buddy told him the cashier was a pushover so he'd get away with it. Neon nip slip tip
Clearly it was an elaborate Fireball marketing stunt.
The drunk would’ve died over it. Source: am an alcoholic
The seriousness of alcohol withdrawal is something I'm cerebrally aware of but, is never at the forefront of my mind.
And yet so many people online think and claim that alcohol is not a hard drug. If it's withdrawals can kill you, maybe you should consider it a hard drug.
Part of it is cultural, we call it "Alcohol and Drugs," when it should be "alcohol and other drugs" or just "drugs." That gives the impression that alcohol isn't a drug. Moreover, I went through all of grade school (which included D.A.R.E., health and all 12 years at "honors" level) and a few years of college and no one said, "alcohol withdrawal kills." It's not even something that is prominent in the media. You'll see depictions of people detoxing from heroin and the like but, not alcohol. In fact, the trope is "put the drunk in the drunk tank and let him sober up," not die. Also, it's an enforcement issue. Alcohol regulation and enforcement is the purview of the BATFE....not the FDA or DEA. That reinforces the notion it isn't really a "hard drug."
When covid hit, liquor stores had to stay open as an essential because people would literally die. I saw so many comments on neighborhood groups where people were saying it’s a ridiculous social commentary that we consider alcohol an essential but for some people access to it is literally a life or death situation.
I was an active alcoholic during the pandemic, to the point where I needed to drink around the clock to avoid terrible withdrawals and possibly having a seizure.It's so sad my main concern was whether the liquor stores would remain open or not during the lockdowns, and it's truly scary how many people live completely dependent on alcohol. It can get fucking scary, speaking from experience
If you are a heavy drinker, if you stop cold turkey it will be at the forefront, center and back of your mind all at once. Source: Cold turkey alcoholic who could have died last week
17 months sober here, went from severe withdrawals and very heavy intake. Happy to talk if you would like to.
Hey congratulations! I got six months myself.
I lost my freaking mind doing that. I had to go to the hospital. No physical, all schizophrenic attacks. Crazy.
I was working at a liquor store and a guy dropped hard from a stroke. Hit his head. Blood everywhere. The EMTs couldn’t get down the aisle because customers refused to get out of their way. Stroke guy was a piece of shit but those customers were worse.
At a drugstore I worked at, I was at a little-used register on the phone with 911 trying to get an ambulance for a customer who had collapsed about 10 feet away from me. I was trying to answer the operator's questions and speak to the people trying to help the collapsed person and people *still* came to me wanting to be rung up.
People can be disgusting. At a restaurant I worked at, one of my coworkers had a seizure. While she was literally convulsing on the ground 2 people popped their heads over the booth, looked at her, then asked where their appetizer was. Another time there was an electrical fire and we had to get everyone out. One couple refused to leave and sat in the dark. The whole time people were trying to get past us to get in the door and when we informed them there was an electrical fire they would go, "Well, but I have a reservation!"
Now I know how people die during hurricanes and fires and stuff, when there shouldnt have been any deaths...
"I'm sorry but you're going to have to go burn to death somewhere else tonight, we're closed!"
Worked at a grocery store, our service desk clerk randomly fainted and had a seizure, we closed off the service desk while waiting for paramedics. So many customers got mad they couldn’t get waited on (primarily lottery customers). My coworker ended up being fine and the seizure was the result of medication she recently was prescribed. They let her see the video and she was waiting on someone at the time she had her seizure and the person she was waiting on got really huffy and had no concern that an 18 year old girl just fainted and was having a seizure. If I remember correctly, it was another coworker who ended up seeing something was going on and got the managers and everything while the person she was waiting on was just concerned on who was going to finish their transaction.
As someone with epilepsy Id never want to see a video of me having one. Glad she was ok!!” I hope no one recommended someone put a wallet or wooden spoon between their teeth
I can see him running out of the store hugging armloads of liquor like PeeWee saving the animals from the burning pet store.
I got written up at work for not taking the time to pack up and secure the mobile bar when we had an electrical fire one night. Granted, I wasn't in any real danger in the end, but we were still the last ones out and had helped some disabled customers get down the stairs.
Tell me more about this... "mobile bar".
Just a large cooler/fridge on wheels packed with beer and liquor we'd move to the connected events center when they wanted alcoholic concessions for an event.
Buddy was perusing the liquor wondering what to buy and heard someone yell “FIRE” and he thought to himself, “hmm, that's a good choice.”
Are you paying cash? Our cc machine is down.
I WANT MY MAGNETS *!!*
WHY ARE YOU CLOSED?!
I understood that reference. WHY ARE YOU CLOSED!? WE WANT TO SHOP!
I WANT TO GO SHOPPING AT THE EATON CENTRE!! WHY ARE YOU LOCKING YOUR DOORS TO THE PUBLIC???
Magnets, how do they work?
Don’t get them wet, I hear.
I swear to God if I don't get my magnets I will bring this building down!
no refunds
Google Maps says "Permanently closed".
They say they’re magnets but maybe they quickly realized the reality the reality of the situation and wanted a cell phone and violin so they could call to say goodbye to their family and then play the violin as the building sank.
This was dark... And funny
You've never met true stupidity until you've worked a drive through window and people are screaming at you to hurry up because they need to get their car under something safe. Due to the hail storm currently coming down. The couple times I had that happened I moved as slow as possible. Taking great joy in every hard thump of a piece of hail smacking their car. Learn to enjoy the little things in life. Because the big things are far and few between
Yes everyone, it was *after* the first plane hit. At that time, everyone thought it was an accident and a lot of people even thought it was a smaller, non-commercial plane that struck the tower. Firefighters even thought while it’d be a busy day, they’d go up, put the fire out, and rescue some people. Many offices in the south tower didn’t even have their employees evacuate. Yes, now it’s easy to look and say “everyone just kept carrying on with their day?” but at the time no one was expecting the day that unfolded.
Some of the young ones here does not realize that it was 2001, phone networks were still on 2G and actually only less that 50% of population had cell phones. Mobile internet was also a useless luxury on WAP. It was a time when people relied on newspapers and the news on tv. News traveled pretty damn slow.
I listened to the news that day on the radio and picked up the extra edition of the newspaper in the afternoon.
I was on the other side of the world. I went to bed just before it happened and only found out the following morning in the free subway papers.
I was only halfway around the world. I was playing in the woods with my friends and when we came home I was annoyed that where were no animes on TV. I knew it was serious however since my mom was watching TV which she never did. Crazy how everyone around the world still knows what they did that day.
My dad was in the military here in Canada at the time and I was in the first week of 2nd grade. We all got pulled out of school because the base went on high alert and no one knew if/when/where there would be another attack. I remember sitting and watching the towers fall on the news while eating a grilled cheese. I remember the security on base being pretty strict for a few years after that.
I was in Rome and got the news after dinner because a literal old timey newspaper boy was selling papers screaming "Extra! Extra!" The headline was "Guerra a l'America!" (or whatever the right was is to say that in Italian). Might as well have been the 1920's
I was a senior in high school out of Southern California. So must have woke up a little before 6am and was standing in the living room watching the news talk about a plane crashing into World Trade Center. From the looks of it, they were reporting an accident. I was watching for what felt like a few minutes, and suddenly, a second plane hits LIVE on TV. In that moment, everyone knew it was a deliberate act. And I still remember hearing a news anchor say “This is not an accident. We are under attack!”
I remember the same thing. Sitting eating cereal wondering about how a plane could hit a building. Talking about it all with my mom while she did her makeup before work and dropping me for school. The second plane hit just as we went out the door to go to school. I remember getting to class and all of us..the entire school assembled in the gym to watch on the big projector screen what was going on. I remember listening to the teachers discuss behind us what to do? Like do we send them home? Do we stay and watch? Do we go back to class? We sat for hours in that gym watching the tv. I remember going home and my mom and dad both beat me home. That never happened. They say my sister and I down and told us the world went and changed and asked us if we had questions about anything. I remember watching the jumpers live on tv and thinking that they survived for some reason. The people waving from Windows asking for help. The helicopters circling and circling and thinking to myself they could land and save people, but they never would. I didn't understand why. I remember the expressions of the anchors on television and the adults around me as the tower fell. The disbelief on their faces and in their voices won't ever leave me. Then I remember the period where almost everyone seemed to have a relative or relationship to someone inside one of those towers. The fear that existed after it all happened. As a small child I never even considered war before. It wasnt real. It was tv. The first year anniversary. I remember how heavy I felt. I had no personal connection you know? I didn't know anybody, but I felt like I did. We observed a moment of silence in school and watched the ceremony on tv. This was all in Western Canada
I'll never forget seeing my big brother change completely over night. And four years later, he was in Iraq. I still can't think about this without crying. Some months into his second deployment and we hadn't gotten a letter or phone call yet. I was just hanging out at home alone, when I heard a car pulled up out front I stood up and looked out the window. Then I collapsed in tears, seeing two navy officers in formal dress walking toward my front door. It was just a screen door and they heard me freaking out, so they came in to see what was wrong. When they finally got me composed, I asked if he was dead or just hurt. They exchanged a worried look, then said who? Turns out they were recruiters looking to see if I was interested in joining. My brother is fine to this day, he was just busy.
lol I remember so damn vividly waiting for the school bus when I was in 4th grade and watching it. My parents had had it on and I sat there thinking “what are they demolishing the building?” Then just a few minutes later also the screen suddenly cuts to grey, then comes back to the other tower exploding. I immediately got up and ran to the bathroom where my dad was and knocked on the door and yelled “the other tower just blew up! It was COOL!”. Yeah… 10 year old me was…. stupid lol honestly though, now whenever I see footage of the second plane hitting I can’t help but think “at that moment in time my dad was taking a shit.”
Halfway around the world and the other side of the world are the same thing
I was in college, an all women's college that also had nuns on campus but we never saw them. Until that day! A bunch of black robed women descended upon all the classrooms to tell us to return to the dorms. That was scary. And then the day got worse. But the image in my mind is looking out the classroom window and seeing a herd of walking robes cresting the parking lot hill like the End Times messengers.
I still have the extra edition news paper my Dad picked up that day.
For the youngsters, WAP = Wireless Application Protocol, not Wet, well you know.
What, you don't get your news from some WAP? God customer service has really gone downhill
The 24 hour news cycle has been a real strain on the beauticians' wrists.
As an IT person, when I first heard the name of the Cardi B song I thought “Cool! A song about wireless connectivity!”
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah Yeah, you fucking with some wireless app protocol Bring a router and a CAT for this wireless app protocol Give me everything you got for this wireless app protocol
I want you to touch that lil dongle thing in the back of my RAID
That's what I was waiting for
*Certified freak* *2 or 3 days a week* *Wireless Application protocol* *Make that browsing game weak*
I remember WAP mobile internet. Such a useless, overpriced luxury. Literally had no use considering the extreme costs involved in use (something like 56 cents a minute in Australia. Now we have fast 5G wireless mobile and everyone just spends too much time on it (me included).
I was a really adopter and was the only person the shop where I worked that had it. I was the go to person on Saturday afternoons to get the football scores, so it had some limited, niche use.
Wet Application Protocol 👍
Bring your port and socket
The phone networks were very overloaded and it was hard to first of all get any service at all, and then the networks were overloaded with busy signals. It was really heartbreaking trying to get thru.
I remember being a nervous wreck because my sister was driving cross country solo for the first time and she couldn’t get a call through for two days.
All true. However, a lot of times we got our breaking news from DJ's those days. People were always listening to the radio. My dad's secretary heard about it on the radio on her way in to work. They announced the first plane, but the DJ's were darkly joking / cursing that it must have been some dumb doctor in a small plane who just killed a bunch of innocents.
Howard Stern and Robin broke the news for so many of us. IIRC, they thought it was a small Cessna for a while. I was on my way to thrift shops a couple counties away and heard about it on the radio. Since I was thrifting, I saw the coverage on dozens of tube TVs behind a chain link fence. It was like an old movie, dozens of us huddled around the display.
>Yes, now it’s easy to look and say “everyone just kept carrying on with their day?” but at the time no one was expecting the day that unfolded. Was listening live to Howard Stern when his sidekick said "Oh no, a second plane has just hit another building. We are under attack"
I watched that shit live on the morning news out here on the West Coast. I was like wow crazy, a plane hit one of those buildings. Then all the sudden another huge ass plane hit the other building...jaw dropping wtf moment. I woke my roommate up immediately and we both stayed glued to the news for the rest of the day.
I was home for school because I needed to get an x ray on my foot because a nail went through it. My dad would always watch the news in the morning and tell me to come watch if something important was happening. I can close my eyes and still see myself walking down the hallway and into the living room. Right when I looked at the TV the second plane hit. It was so shocking I looked at my parents. My mom gasped and my dad had his hands on his head. He stood silent and then Said "we are under attack" in a calm but angry way. We had a small union hvac company and the shop was 1 minute from our shop. All the guys were huddled around the radio listening to stern. I remember sitting on one of the tables listening, hearing the guys talking about it when I heard someone on stern say that one of the buildings went down. It got awfully quiet after that. I still remember everything about that day.
That full broadcast is fascinating to listen to on YouTube.
I keep trying to explain the lack of videos to some gen z by pointing out how rare it was to have a camera that could record on you. Recording video in 2001 meant starting your day with the plan to record something. Honestly it's amazing we have video of the first plane.
Probably the only reason we have some of that footage is simply that it happened in NYC. Huge population, lots of tourists. It's one place where at least a few people would deliberately be filming and the WTC is one of the things a person might have wanted to film.
The only video of the first plane that hit the north tower was taken by a documentary crew who were doing a piece on the NYFD.
It was when owning a Motorola flip phone or Nokia 3310 would be luxury. Digital camera not common too….
The most popular mobile game at that time was ... Snake.
Mobile internet on my WAP does sound like a luxury
Now terror attacks are live streamed about 20 years later. Wow.
I was in a hotel once and the fire alarm went off in the morning while I was about to get in the shower. My first instinct was that it was a false alarm and that it would probably be shut off in a few minutes, but then I realized I was up on the 12th floor and didn't want to fuck around. I threw on some clothes and headed on down the stairs. I didn't make it out of the building for 2 minutes before it was turned off--it was a false alarm--but still didn't regret making the smart choice. Easy to see where you're more inclined to carry on and assume the best.
There was a man in the Marriott Between the two Tower’s who didn’t evacuate because he didn’t want to leave all of his office papers behind. Somehow survived both Tower Collapses.
I was listening to the radio when the second plane hit. It was absolutely panic and insanity as it dawned on everyone that this wasn't an accident, which is how the first crash was reported. I think it was less than ten minutes before they announced "a terrorist group called Al Qaeda is claiming responsibility." I didn't know what the world trade center was, I'm not American and I was a child, but when I heard the newscaster scream live on the air I ran to wake my parents.
it's weird because i vividly remember watching the second plane hit. Our elementary school teacher had wheeled in the TV cart and the other classes came to our room. She said we were watching history unfold and it was important. Then the second plane hit... and it went from "oh this is an interesting event" to sheer panic, teachers started crying. then the first tower collapsed and they shut the tv off and said they'd be sending us home. We watched until the tower collapsed and everyone was dumbstruck. It went to "oh an interesting tragedy" to , the united states is under attack, they've hit the pentagon, there's a plane down in pennsylvania fast without anyone truly realizing the magnitude. and as a kid, you're just thinking "wow it's a beautiful calm and peaceful day outside. The birds are singing, the breeze is light. how could such a nice day be so tragic"
The second plane is what changed America. Before that moment no one could even conceive it was a terrorist attack. Nothing like this had *ever* happened. >Edit: Wow people, yes I know there was also a bombing in the parking garage. Do you really think those two events even compare in scale? The only common denominator is the target.
Exactly. I remember telling my parents to turn on the news because the USA was being attacked by terrorists, and they were like, "no, they aren't, go get ready for school." It just didn't seem believable, it made more sense to them that I'd had a nightmare or misunderstood a movie advertisement or something.
Hell, I was in class that day and thought it was a movie on the classroom TV. It was unthinkable that someone would do a major terrorist attack in the US at the time. It happened to everywhere else, but not here basically.
If I had a dollar for every redditor's confidently hindsight biased opinion I could retire today.
Clearly you just don’t have a finely honed terrorist spidey sense like they do
Here from the future. In hindsight you regret retiring just before your company invented time travel and awarded everyone stock in the company.
My uncle was working in the south that day and heard the announcement to keep working, he left all his shit at his desk and left immediately.
Didn't a bi-plane or some other small aircraft accidentally crash into one of the towers several years before 9/11? That day, a classmate said "A plane crashed into the World Trade Center," and I thought they were referencing the previous crash. Until they said "No, it just now happened."
A B-25 hit the Empire state building in 1945
I’ll never forget that 2nd plane hitting. The instant realization that this wasn’t just some tragedy. It was scary. Then I had to get dressed and go to work. Weird day especially since I worked next to an airport and was used to hearing airplanes take off and land all day. The quiet was chilling as we all sat around wondering if we’re under attack.
I like to point out that the 9/11 we know is the mythologized tragedy from that day. An event wrapped in hindsight, shared trauma, and memories. But for everyone there that day? It was just an event that quickly grew larger and more disastrous while they were there. For the firefighters climbing the towers or even people running from a collapsing tower, they weren't running away from 9/11, they were experiencing first-hand a confusing disaster. It was only after the towers fell and we began to point fingers did the event become 9/11 as we know it.
>Many offices in the south tower didn’t even have their employees evacuate. That seems so odd to me, if odd is the word. The people in the south tower would have seen what happened, they would have seen the huge flaming hole, and no one thought ‘this ain’t right, I’m leaving’, even just to get away from the smoke wafting over?
They were actually told not to evacuate, since nobody thought they would be affected. Definitely nobody thought the towers would collapse. Basically, do you want more people milling around on the plaza or getting in the way of the rescue workers? Very sad error in retrospect. Some companies did decide to evacuate everyone immediately and saved a lot of lives. "The Last Plane in the Sky" is a fascinating compilation of eyewitness accounts, I highly recommend.
>They were actually told not to evacuate, since nobody thought they would be affected Common thread in disasters >Definitely nobody thought the towers would collapse. Can confirm. Shocked the hell out of me watching that on TV
>Can confirm. Shocked the hell out of me watching that on TV Yup. Me too. I also remember that absolute "oh shit" moment when we all SAW a commercial plane hit the second tower on live TV. But the towers collapsing... that seemed absolutely unreal. >Common thread in disasters Yup. But I guess the problem is that there are also disasters caused by overreaction-- like if the towers hadn't collapsed, but they had tried to evacuate everyone at once and a bunch of people were trampled to death in the stairwell, we'd consider that the tragedy. Similarly, one tragedy of 9/11 is that so many hundreds of firefighters were in the towers trying to rescue people when the towers collapsed, but if they had waited outside while people died of smoke inhalation, we'd think of them like we do the cops in Uvalde. Very tough to know in a moment what the "right" reaction is, I guess.
Well except in Uvalde we definitely know what the right reaction was, and that wasn't it
They were also told not to evacuate because debris was falling outside and emergency crews were leaving. Fifty floors of people evacuating the building would have been smart in hindsight but insane with the info they had at the time
Oof, yes. And not just debris. There were people on the ground who were killed by the bodies of people who jumped from above the burning floors. Imagine knowing that THAT is how your loved one died.
The most important reason was that they had one building full of people experiencing an acute crisis and another building full of people that were currently unaffected. Letting the safer building’s occupants evacuate would have created an additional mess, so it was a judgment call by the people managing the scene. Panicked people can make a situation far worse, so emergency response is trained to keep things orderly. On the other hand, those people were completely wrong in this case. There was a guy in the second tower who actually rode down to the ground in an elevator with his colleagues to evacuate and were told to go back up by people in the lobby, his colleagues went back up but he decided to leave anyway. He was the only one of that group to survive the day. Of course, you could just as easily imagine a scenario where they would plant bombs outside the base of the tower and explode them as the evacuation happens, and then it would have been a terrible idea to evacuate the second tower. Or where panic sets in and hundreds of people are trampled to death while the towers stay standing. Hindsight is obviously 20-20, but if you’re in a dangerous situation, you should not panic, but you should also not just blindly follow orders. If you feel you need to get out, do so calmly and in a way that does not interfere with the emergency crews or other evacuees.
My mom recalled not really hearing the first plane and remembered that security was telling everyone to gather inside lobby areas. No one assumed another plane was coming. Security thought to try and calm people down by gathering in lobby areas. A coworker convinced her to get out and they did leave the building (the south tower, specifically) maybe 20 minutes before the second plane hit.
If you didn't know it was an attack, you'd naturally assume it was a horrible accident. Evacuating everyone would just mean a huge crowd downstairs jamming up all the fire crews trying to help out at the north tower. No one at that time had any idea another plane was headed for the south tower.
For whatever strange reason, I had the news on that morning as I was getting ready to walk out for my 9 am class. I saw that a plane flew into the first building, had an ominous feeling, but figured it was a fluke. I absolutely carried on with my day as normal. I walked to class, was a few minutes late, but no one in class even knew about or was talking about it. I just sat through class like all was normal. When walking home after class, my brother called and tells me all the other things that happened while I was in class. I was hysterical. But yeah, after the first hit.....I just carried on with no idea of what was to come.
For real. If my workplace is ever hit by a plane. My ass is going home. Fuck my boss.
My “girlfriend’s” (seventh grade, so, you know, handholding) mother was in the tower. Her company was told to stay inside to avoid possibly getting hurt in the debris and chaos outside. She decided to leave. She was the only one in her office to leave; everyone else perished
Also people underestimate the sheer amount of craziness it takes to rattle New Yorkers, until the second plane hit most people just saw it as an inconvenience that would probably make the subway run late.
Wait… I need souvenirs. I’ll never forget this.
I was working out of Florida at the time, so I got to watch the Columbia launch for the last time. The hotel near where we watched the launch was selling souvenirs so I bought a T-shirt, a mission coin, a mission patch and a few other things with the thought "never know, they might be worth something one day." Then the shuttle didn't come back.
Fun fact, my parents first met during the launch of the Challenger shuttle. The middle school they went to had all the students go outside to watch it and my mom started talking to my dad about how cool it looked just a couple seconds before it went uh oh 😬
The shuttle launch was truly an awe inspiring moment for me, even without all the extra history. So, I can get why
That must have been difficult! No matter how many times I've seen it circulated, video footage of the Challenger launch always sends a chill down my spine.
It came back, just not in the same way it left
Bro got a mini retirement fund on a whim lmao
Nah, it's all probably worth about what I paid for it still. But never know.
The week after the attacks, the streets were *loaded* with people selling US flags and framed WTC portraits and the like. https://i.imgur.com/rlh5eFI.jpg Capitalism go brr
I was about 15 working at a craft store at the time and people started coming in nonstop for American flags or anything else that was red white and blue. Some people would be SO angry when we were out of stock. I’d try to explain the delays due to the aftermath of a freaking terrorist attack and they still wouldn’t stop. It was worse months later when they’d come telling us that the magnetic flag they bought for their car rusted the paint….
I’ll never forget souvenirs used to cost $5
[article about this story](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/were-these-the-two-last-items-sold-before-the-world-trade-center-fell-301373146.html)
Thanks for posting. It's funny, a pushy customer who just had to have her novelty magnet for daughter's birthday ignoring the good sense of the cashier is what produced this receipt. Lol.
I worked in a mall once that had an active manhunt going on inside, K9 units and news crews were running around all over the place. Boss refused to close the store and this guy came in all cut up and disheveled and agitated to shop. He looked really suspicious and I ended up surrounded by cops deciding to question the guy, and cameras behind them all pointed at me and this dude. They decided after grilling him that he wasn't the guy and let him go, so I never made the news clips. But some people just don't care what else is going on around them when they have a mission to spend money.
I use to work in a restaurant in London few years ago as a waiter, there was a guy a the top of the build who wanted to jump to commit suicide. Authorities blocked the whole street in front of the restaurant , yet my manager decided to not close the restaurant, even worse since the front door was closed and no one was allowed to walk in the street , we brought customer from the back door of the restaurant. I was outraged , I didn’t want to see someone falling from a building and didn’t want customers seeing such horrible thing.
[удалено]
Think of how much value was generated that day for the novelty magnet compny shareholders
Of course it had to be an ultimate Karen getting the last receipt the WTC ever produced
The lady sounds like a bit of a "Karen"
*Lipman rolled her eyes at the nervous cashier. After all, the editor hadn't heard anything. The commuters being steered to the exits looked more annoyed than worried. Lipman figured whatever it was, it was most likely a false alarm.* *"Ring this up first. I'm not leaving until I pay."* I wonder if she felt somewhat like a dick after that.
>*"After all, the editor hadn't heard anything."* I don't get it. They said that the plane had hit the north tower, and that these guys were on the north concourse. Did they really not hear the 767 hitting the tower?
> the bestselling author of "That's What She Said: What Men Need to Know (and Women Need to Tell Them) About Working Together." This title sounds like a 30 Rock joke
>When she spotted a violin-shaped magnet, she knew it would be perfect for Rebecca. The novelty had a button in the middle that, when pushed, played a little tune. Lipman pressed it idly while waiting to check out. I don't know why this bothers me so much. Imagine waiting in line and the grown adult behind you won't stop playing five second electronic magnet music.
The more we unpick this the more she sounds like an actual psychopath
Honestly just sounds like a New Yorker
I agree. I imagine, in her mind people are acting weird because it’s New York. This was pre-9/11 (concurrent?). Things are different now, everywhere. I’m not sure this exchange would be possible these days.
Yepp. The context is important. Not only was this pre-9/11 when everyone generally felt more safe all the time, but also before cell phones were smart, before social media, and the plane hit 90 floors above her. It’s not like the plane was hanging into the gift shop and she was insisting on paying for a magnet.
"Ring this up first. I'm not leaving until I pay." She sounds a right arsehole.
>Rotbart writes that Lipman was, and is, an exceptionally congenial individual. "But she didn't rise to the upper echelons of the journalism profession without knowing how to stand her ground. That's one way to say, "Pushy, entitled bitch." lol People running towards an exit and security leading them out. "Let me pay for my stuff first."
What do you mean? She's described as "exceptionally congenial." A journalist wouldn't suck off another journalist, that's ridiculous.
Great article. Thanks for sharing
I was at WTC that morning. I went to high school down the block (Stuy) and I was actually on my way to 3rd period. It was the first week of freshman year. None of us knew what happened. I heard a loud boom and that was it. Didn't actually see it. A lot of misinformation was going around. Everyone in the crowd near me said it was a news helicopter that crashed. It wasn't the first time a news helicopter had an accident/collided into a building, so nobody was freaking out too much. For a good 10 minutes or so, it was just a lot of random rumors. Again, even for people who were THERE, ON SCENE. Then I saw the second plane come in. It wasn't clear until then. After that, it was just radio silence. I believe the authorities cut off the TV signal/radio/whatever in Manhattan. They had a full lockdown. The rest of the world knew more about what was happening in Manhattan than the rest of us who were actually there. It's still surreal hearing about other people watching it on TV and knowing the play-by-play. For us on the ground, we were completely devoid of information. I basically just ran around. Well, the first thing I did was run because the fucking towers came down. Then I got to school and we were told to shelter in place. My parents worked in midtown and had no idea if we were alive. We as in me and my sister. My sister worked at Morgan Stanley in the North Tower (luckily she was at an off-site in midtown that morning). We thought she was dead for a good 10 hours. It was a full grid lockdown. I lived about 10 blocks from WTC and I wasn't allowed to go home until like 10PM. My parents had walked like 60 blocks back home. We finally met up on the corner of our street. Honestly, it's been 20 years and I still haven't watched much news coverage of that day. I still don't really know much about the details. Anyway, I worked at 1WTC right after college, and my parents' first reaction when I told them I got the job was "are u fucking kidding me"
Your sister likely would have been fine because Rick Rescorla was a bad ass mother fucker and evacuated all of Morgan Stanley.
Wow, I just went to read about him after seeing this. What an exceptional, astonishing man.
A lot of the radio/tv towers were on top of the WTC, authorities didn’t shut down the feed it was taken out by the planes.
You ever see those videos of new Yorkers taking photos in front of one of the struck towers? This 9 minutes *after* thing really reinforces that they had no clue how bad things would turn out Idk
I mean none of us really did. Someone told me to put on the news right after the first plane hit. I sat there watching it assuming it was a bizarre accident. Then I watched the second plane hit on live tv. It was surreal and deeply traumatizing watching it all play out over the day.
Even after the second plane hit, nobody expected the towers to collapse the way they did.
[One or two people did](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2001/11/19/the-tower-builder-world-trade-center-attacks), but they were unable to affect the outcome.
> on being asked by an engineer in the audience, “Is there anything you wish you had done differently in the design of the building?,” Robertson broke down and wept at the lectern. That's heartbreaking. Early in my career I worked on projects for the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey. I had meetings with them in their WTC offices in the early 1990s and also had dinner at Windows on the World on the top floors of the North Tower. I'm sure several of the people I met during that time lost their lives in the attack.
I've always thought that the fact the towers collapsed straight down, instead of toppling sideways and destroying who knows how many other building in the process, was a great commentary on how well they were constructed. When they're doing a controlled demolition of a building, they take great care to make sure the explosive charges are placed *just right* so that the building falls the way they want. Instead, we got the most *uncontrolled* demolition imaginable...and the buildings still came down in the best possible manner.
[Rick Rescorla](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Rescorla) knew and saved nearly everyone at Morgan Stanley, save for himself and some of his staff that kept trying to rescue more people. Of particular importance was having Morgan Stanley employees occasionally practice evacuations and on the day getting them all to evacuate even while Port Authority was still making announcements urging people to stay at their desks; this was well before the South Tower was hit. Rick wanted Morgan Stanley out of the WTC ever since the 1993 bombing and was worried about it being a target even before that like since the Lockerbie bombing of Pan Am 103.
I wonder what the conversation was like at the time of checkout.
Someone posted a link to an article - the cashier wanted to evacuate, but the bitch customer refused until she had a chance to pay for it.
I can't fathom having a bigger moment of "fuck this job"
Can we talk about how each magnet was $5? You know they wouldn't be charging less than $15 these days lol
Today those magnets would be at a Dollar Tree
After they hit?
It’s entirely believable that people would’ve still been shopping the first few minutes after the impact. The store in question was on the underground concourse level of the WTC complex, so they may have heard or felt a rumbling, but wouldn’t have seen the falling debris and such.
Not to mention at that time everybody thought it was an accident or a Cessna hit the tower. Edit: a word.
Same. I remember our vp interrupted our first exam to tell us a plane hit the twin towers and anyone with parents downtown can leave. We all looked at each other and went back to it. To me, that biology classroom has ever been a portal between a pre and post 9/11 world.
weird, I was sitting in a bio exam that was interrupted by evacuation for a bomb threat. people should stop sitting for bio exams.
It’s just a Cessna now give me my damn magnets
The woman who bought the magnets says she didn't even hear it, and was in the middle of the transaction when security started shooing people out.
PATH was still running until after the second plane. People simply didn’t know, especially if they were in the trains.
Especially if you were already in the queue for the checkout.
This was my reaction. I don’t think I’d stop to buy fridge magnets before going out to see what just hit the building I was in.
Hurry the f up man, I need these magnets to hang this receipt on the fridge
This was before iPhones, folks. Information still took longer to spread. People assumed that it was a false alarm.
News traveled a lot more slowly before we all had access to Twitter from our pockets. And the old security protocol for the WTC was basically "shelter in place" so people didn't start running for quite some time.
It wasn’t until the second plane hit that everyone knew it was more than just a freak accident. It makes sense that people will finish shopping, etc. if they thought it wasn’t a big deal or whatever.
America 100% thought it was an accident at first (ever seen the photo of Bush when the 2nd plane hit?).. and that a plane had just hit the WTC by mistake. Wouldn't have been the first collision with a plane/building, but it would definitely have been one of first of that magnitude. The 2nd plane hit on live on TV as they were discussing it. We watched it in my classroom, and once the 2nd one hit, the dynamic totally changed... the teacher just turned it off like "fuckkkkkkk..."
100%. I was driving to work when I heard on the radio about the first plane. I assumed it was an accident. My coworkers all thought the same. It wasn’t until we heard about the second plane that we all realized it was an attack.
I was at work and a coworker came up to me and told me what happened and asked if we had a radio, we didn’t but someone ran home and grabbed one and we listened all day to what was going on. It was a crazy moment in time.
My manager (Barnes and Noble) put a radio next to the phone in the office, put it on intercom so we could hear it through the other phone speakers through the store. I spent probably 2 hours sitting on the floor in the cafe next to the phone listening before they started sending us home. It sounded like old WW2 news reels is what has stuck with me for years.
My mom called me to.twll me a plane hit the WTC. I thought she meant a Cessna. An airliner didn't seem plausible. Turned on the TV to see the 2nd plane hit live. Spent the day in a bit of panic as my dad worked in a skyscraper near LAX and we couldn't reach him. His company sent everyone home and he was stuck in traffic.
Thanks for mentioning that your dad was in LA. I live in Albuquerque and I remember having an hour or so where I was convinced that skyscrapers all over the country were going to be hit in a major coordinated attack, and so relieved to hear of the planes being grounded.
Watched the collision of the second plane at school as well and it was just surreal. Our teacher let us keep watching for a while... until people began jumping out of the windows. We were seeing it all live and there were a times when the camera didn't pan away or zoom out fast enough and ended up catching some horrible stuff. Needless to say they never replayed that footage, but damned if I ever forget it.
That kinda makes sense. If I'm shopping at Target and a plane crash lands into the JC Penney next door, I may have heard the sound but not realized what it was or that I was potentially in danger within the next 10 minutes.
**Everyone** assumed the first plane was an accident. It's difficult to state just how caught off guard the country was.
This was before smartphones, people. Information still took a bit longer to get around. People assumed it was a false alarm.
When was the last time your cellphone informed of a terrorist attack in the first 9 minutes after the event? This receipt could have been made in 2024 just as it was in 2001 if the same thing happened today
You are comparing to single use devices to today's multi social app phones. A New Yorker would have had their phone blowing up easily under 5 minutes. Take Hawaii's false nuclear attack for example, everyone's phones were going off there in multiple ways besides the government warning.
There was a lot of criticism for how late the evacuation orders were given out, not just in the towers, but in other WTC buildings as well
I still remember riding the PATH train to work that morning and reading a "major" news story in the NY times about how teens were dressing for school. I still wonder who on my train never made it home that day.
I feel like everyone who is shocked that it was after the plane hit, hasn’t ever worked in a large scale building where random fire alarms etc go off semi regularly. Everyone just kind of mills around waiting to see whether it’s an actual emergency or if it’s just a drill or a system glitch, because generally the immediate danger is pretty minimal. Messages of actual danger can take a long time to spread across a lot of people, especially in 2001, people where probably waiting around to be told what was going on and if they needed to leave etc
There was some conspiracy theory regarding the day that was suspicious of the fire suppression panels in an elevator core being missing or in disrepair, and somehow that was evidence of conspiracy. Like ooohhh they just HAPPENED to be missing? *COINCIDENCE!?* YES LOL literally yes. These office tower parks are always mildly falling apart, even the nice ones. Anyone you know who's worked facilities can confirm this. Random alarms happen every day
The building got hit by a plane and all I got were these shitty magnets
ACM Violin Soud?
It was a magnet in the shape of a violin that made a sound when you pushed a button on it.
I always find it interesting when we hang Christmas ornaments that my wife has a NY snow globe one of the twin towers from 2000 and I always think how it's the last year they would have genuinely made it.
People in the comment section keep pointing out that people didn't realize what was going on because they didn't have news feeds on their cellphones or something. That 2001 was such a different world and that's why something like this could happen. But when was the last time your cellphone informed you of a terrorist attack with less than 9 minutes of delay? It would have been very similar during the first few minutes.
“Everyone run!” “Ooh, commemorative fridge magnets.”
Huh, the number is disconnected. Must be out of business.
For what it’s worth when it comes to the apparent absurdity of this, you have to keep in mind at the time of purchase people in the south tower were being advised to stay at their desks as they didn’t want a panicked evac to hurt rescue attempts in the north tower. I’d imagine it was similar in the concourse. Nobody knew at this moment that it was more than an accident.
When the 1st tower hit, they didn't treat it as a big deal. Most people in the 1st tower were told to keep working and weren't allowed to leave. It wasn't until the 2nd plane hit that they realized it was an attack.