I was still at home, as at the time I worked for a bank, and we had to pull 2 days of working 11AM to 7PM. I was watching my local Fox affiliate, and drinking my coffee still trying to wake up from my haze (I'm worthless in the morning without that first cup of Joe
). The local station said that CNN was reporting a plane crash in NYC and that it hit the World Trade Center. Immediately I switched to CNN to watch, and saw the north tower on fire. As I'm watching and listening to the reporters I see the second plane hit! I was like WTF??? The reporters didn't even realize it, and still being in my haze (as the caffeine hadn't quite kicked in yet) I thought a small plane (as there were helicopters in the area) had gotten too close was blinded by the smoke, and therefore crashed. The thought going through my mind was that someone was being nosy, and I was cursing at them for making a bad situation worse. Then the reporters caught on, and said "another plane just hit!" Then they replayed it and I noticed that it was another jet liner. Then my thought was "WTF is going on with these pilots and in the NY airports? I mean, it's a clear day!" Between that and the caffeine kicking in it was like, "uhhhhhhhh waaiiiiiiitttt a minute... this isn't an accident!"
So, I get on my way to work which is about a half an hour commute, and reports start coming through on the radio that a plane hit the Pentagon. When I got to work, as I pulled into the parking lot and was getting out of the car I had heard that a plane crashed outside of Pittsburgh. I immediately called my wife because who knows WTH was going to happen next, and she was going into a meeting and rushed me off of the phone. Well, then all phone lines were jammed. Now, at work, nobody could focus, and our system was offline as our main headquarters was in downtown Cleveland. They had tvs in the our cafeteria and were showing the coverage. I witnessed the collapse of both towers live! We were all shocked, sad, and angry! We also heard that they forced a plane to land at Cleveland Hopkins, as it was another suspected hijacked plane. Don't know to this day if it was another plane, but thankfully the plane landed safely without incident. At noon we were told that downtown Cleveland was pretty much being evacuated, and our main office was being shut down for the day. We were told to go home. Since I knew it would be a cluster f*** trying to get out of my office with over 1,000 people leaving at once, I decided to stand in the parking lot at work and chat with a coworker while traffic had cleared out at which time we heard fighter jets in the sky, but couldn't see them. By then US airspace had been shut down, so they were the only aircraft in the sky.
When I had gotten home, I was finally able to reach my wife to let her know I was home. She apologized that she rushed me off the phone, and said she tried to call me back, but couldn't because of the phone lines being jammed. The reason for rushing me off of the phone was because she had to go into a meeting. She was also irritated that her company which was a small company wasn't shutting down due to the events taking place! I went back out to go get gas as there were rumors of gas stations jacking up their prices due to what was going on, and I wanted to make sure I got it before it went up. It was really weird not hearing any planes in the sky what so ever! We have friends in the NYC area one being a cop in the Bronx so I had called to make sure that they were OK. She had just gotten home from the late night shift, and went to bed, when her brother woke her up and said the trade center blew up! She didn't believe him at first.
That evening my wife and I watched the never ending coverage, and in fact for at least a MONTH we could not watch normal programming and were glued to CNN, FOX and MSNBC because we had to know what was going to happen next.
At the time I had season tickets to the Cleveland Browns. One Sunday in October (I believe it may have been the 7th??? not sure) I was at the Browns game and they were taking on the San Diego Chargers (the Browns won that game in the last minute and a half
). At half time the announcer came over the PA and had announced that we had begun bombing Afghanistan. The whole place went crazy and erupted in cheers!
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