Apologies if the therad has moved away from the "Where were you when..." topic, but I'm just now seeing this, and I wanted to toss in.
I was driving to work at the time. I work for a national video gaming publication, located in California, so we're on Pacific time. I was listening to Howard Stern as I droove to work, and Howard is always on a 3-hour recorded delay each day, so we don't have to get up at 3am to hear his show.
He and his folks were talking about how he made out with Pamela Lee at a club, or something equally inane. Then Gary Dellabate came in and said someone crashed into the WTC.
Now, the fact that a highway sign had announced that all flights from SFO (San Francisco Int'l Airport) were cancelled didn't make me think of anything. I saw it and figured, "Heh, SFO sucks, it always has."
As the Stern show progressed, everyone thought it was some drunken pilot crashing into the WTC by accident. I was surprised it hadn't happened before. I mean, the WTC was BIG, and planes fly through there all the time, right? Then the second plane hit.
Now, mind you, I was hearing this three hours after it really happened. But to me it was happening as I listened. The reactions on the radio and in myself were as real time as anything.
I rode on the train to work, and no one spoke. Howard, upon hearing that a second plane had hit, had decided it was a terrorist attack. No one on the train wanted to do anything but think of what it meant. Should we all go home and gather canned goods? Will those of us whose eyes hadn't been destroyed by computer screens have to go off to Boot Camp? We would definitely go to war over this. One thing was for sure: Nothing would ever be the same.
I went in to work and found out that the CEO of my company had asked everyone to stay home, but because of my commute, I'd left before the message got there. We were expecting a visit from Microsoft to show us the then-pre-release Xbox and some games, so I figured I'd wait it out. Scared out of my wits. Knowing deep down that, if there were going to be more targets, San Francisco could have been one of them.
Two other people from my office showed up, out of the entire staff--one of our senior editors, and our editor-in-chief. At the appointed time, the MS reps showed up. They had landed in SFO that morning, before it all happened. I couldn't imagine having landed moments before hearing the news.
So the rest of that work day we played Xbox. We played Fuzion Frenzy, Bloodwake, and Halo. We scrounged the local neighborhood for a deli that was open. We played more Xbox. We didn't talk about the WTC incident at all, except at the end of the day, to say, "Thanks for braving terrorism with us." To this day I'm proud that we were there in the city, and I'm glad that I wasn't at home all day watching horrible news footage of people leaping to their deaths and of landmarks crumbling to the ground with thousands trapped inside.
The work day over, I rode the train home, called my girlfriend, and cried. I was already mourning the carefree feelings of September 10th, when the worst I had to worry about was what I was going to eat for lunch, whether I could afford to take my girlfriend out to eat, and other similar "problems." I just knew that things would never be the same.
Now, a year later, things are just about back to normal. Americans are free to hate each other again. Drivers shout at pedestrians, spam fills up my emailbox, and yay, Oakland has toped the national charts again for the nation's per-capita murder center.
It's odd, but in some ways I now look back at the first few months after 9/11 and wish that the human spirit we Americans discovered during that time could have lasted. Now we're arguing about whether or not there should be nudity in a new BMX game for PS2, when months before we as a nation were helping families build lives out of the rubble of the WTC. Now we're arguing over what sort of memorial should stand there, as if the hundreds of bodies still trapped at the site weren't enough.
Anyway, like the original author of this thread.... Sept. 11th was the day that I gamed.