So where was everyone on Sept 11? And how did you first hear of the events?
I woke up in my crappy apartment north of Dean Keaton in Austin. I went to my computer and turned it on. My homepage was cnn.com. For whatever reason, it wouldn't load that morning (obviously I soon found out it was because everyone on earth was trying to get on CNN.com.).
The next site I went to was the ESPN Texas Rangers board. There I was greated to a page full of posts about "PENTAGON COLLAPSED" and so forth.
This was at a time when the Rangers board was frequently trashed by Mariners fans, or by Shark, or by any number of 10 year olds, so I wasn't sure at first what was up, but within moments, I saw several "regulars" there posting (I think Texassportsfan was one of them).
I turned on my TV, which wasn't actually plugged in. So I had to do the stupid thing where it scans all the channels and programs the ones that work. As it went through the possible lineup it paused for a split second at each channel, where I was greeted with one disaster after another, including a few of what appeared to be downtown NY with only one remaining WTC tower.
As soon as the channel programming stopped, I went to CBS news for whatever reason, and within 3 minutes, the second WTC building had collapsed.
I hung around my apt for a while before heading to campus, not sure what was going to go on that day.
My first class was a construction engineering class. That class was cancelled by my professor. One girl asked why, but class was leaving by then. I asked her if she had seen the news this morning. She had, but didn't know why we should cancel class.
I walked to the UT student union and had a very, very surreal lunch of Chick-Fil-A.
My only other class that day was a water engineering class. It went on, for whatever reason. I am not sure I learned much.
Anyway that's my boring story.