by ivor_the_injun » Mon May 12, 2008 3:32 am
At the time I was working at the Press Association, which is a massive news agency in London. I saw on the BBC website about the first plane hitting, and at that point everyone in the office was talking fairly jovially as if it was just bellend glider-man floating in at no speed.
The section I worked on shared part of the floor with the finance division, who had a 14" portable telly in their area. Suddenly a few people started to mill around to watch, and after a few seconds there were gasps and various bleats ringing out from over there. Everyone - and we're talking about 50 people - gradually converged on this telly, and I don't think we moved for about an hour. During the time we were there watching the endless reruns of the first plan hitting, the second plane struck and suddenly the realisation dawned on everybody.
The unnerving thing about it all was these poor guys in finance, who actually knew a lot of people that were working in the World Trade Center - many of them were in day-to-day contact and they treated one another as colleagues. There was one guy sitting not 3 metres away from me who had been emailing to-and-fro with someone in the first tower about a story, and suddenly the correspondence went completely dead. It was over a month later that he found out he'd been one of the lucky ones.
Rest of the time at work was all a bit of a daze. I got work done, but the atmosphere in the office was just horrible. Now we knew it was a terrorist attack, and it started to emerge that all news outlets in London were being viewed as potential targets. There was talk of us being evacuated and sent home, but then we heard that Canary Wharf had been evacuated, and management were renting out every spare desk we had to all of the news outlets that were suddenly temporarily homeless. Our building was just your common or garden 7 floor office in amongst dozens of other such structures, and a pilot would have to be like one of your Red Bull Air Race guys to get even close to colliding with it, so our minds collectively raced about what other imaginative ways terrorists could use to get at us. To add to it all, police vans appeared on our road outside the offices, never knew why exactly, but it seemed fairly plain that they were there for our protection.
Our floor wasn't too badly overrun with Canary Wharf folk, but the floors above and below were absolute pandemonium. Hacks aren't the most pleasant people at the best of times, but with so many theories and so few facts, not to mention that there were now rival publications sitting side-by-side, it just descended into f*cking noise.
I remember that I left the office early that day, which was a first. The real oddity for me was that I'd treated my then-girlf, now-wife to tickets to see Stereophonics at some special Q Magazine thing at The Scala taking place that night.
So, in spite of all the stress of the day, now when people ask me about 9/11, I just say it was awful, horrible, gut-wrenching... Kelly Jones' voice just knocks me sick.
Sidenote to the story is that we had tickets to Eurodisney on Sept 14th, which was initially worrying, but actually worked out very well. If we hadn't flown so soon afterwards, I think we'd have put off flying for months if not years to come.
Horrible day. Eddie Izzard has it right though - it shouldn't be named after the 9th of November.
by 