Hmmm, I was in 8th grade. I walked into the class and the teacher was already watching it on TV.
I think we closed a little early on 9/11 but later than most of the other locations within the company which was odd since my office was in manhattan and i could see the towers on fire from it. We were closed on 9/12. Manhattan was a ghost town.
Yeah not mourning, more like fear and i think the not closing immediately was because they didnt know what to do and getting out of Manhattan was not easy depending on where you lived. I think people had to walk across bridges
No idea when we closed, not sure if we did, but anyone who needed to leave, did.
Probably worked from home for a few days
I imagine the teachers talked about with the older kids. But my kids were in a K-5 school.
My kids were in three different grade schools.
I picked up the K-5, wife got Middle schooler, HS was allowed to leave
In retrospect, I don’t know kids at that age can be traumatized by something like that.
I was on the west coast and I didn’t even know what the twin towers were. And what happened on TV was a blur to me. We did some holding hands thing on the street to show support and I only understood the point of that when I was much older.
We had just moved out of NYC, and my kids had been to the twin towers. I’m just as glad they didn’t spend the day watching video of the towers collapsing and people jumping out windows.
I don’t think it would have been catastrophic for the kids if their teachers told them, but I think some of the parents might have lost their shit. It was a good risk-reduction move for the school to tell the parents to tell their kids.
we did, barely.
But I remember, shortly after 9/11, every department in the company had to make plans for what to do if there was a catastrophe and we couldn’t get to the office. And my department’s plan was “we’re not critical, we just delay our work”.
(We did stuff like project trends used in pricing. Yeah, it’s better to have an updated look at that stuff. But your customers aren’t in the streets if you fail to update them. Obviously, the claims adjusters needed a more robust plan than we did.)
Well yeah, everything in NYC shut down. I’m not talking about that.
My then-husband reached out to his co-workers in the WTC, and they were all fine as they were not in the towers. It was before I was on any kind of social media and I’d lost touch with all my WTC co-workers but they were not in the towers either, so I assume they were all fine.
At work the President of the subsidiary I was in reached out to the WTC clients (two of whom were in the towers) and said something along the lines of “Hey I know things are super crazy, but whenever you can, please let us know if you’re ok. We’re all worried about you and our thoughts & prayers go to the entire team at ABC Client, Inc. Please let me know how we can help you.” Responses were communicated to the whole subsidiary as well as the parent company. But we wanted a single point of contact as we knew they were already busy telling everyone they were / weren’t ok and dealing with more pressing matters.
I think kids got sent home when Regan got shot. (I was already home)
In sheer coincidence, I was home sick from school when:
Reagan got shot
The Pope got shot
Shuttle blew up
Lennon was shot
Lennon getting shot affected me more than QE2 death but 911 tragedy was on a whole different level.
Wow, I was definitely not sent home from school when Reagan was shot. In fact, I’m not sure I was ever sent home from school early for any reason at all. I can’t think of any, at any rate.
It’s not so much as the kids themselves being traumatized by the event directly but some of the residual effects upon their parents (potentially) and a lot of other adults. That is, helping the kids to understand why some adults are behaving “differently”.
I’ve found that most younger kids are pretty sensitive to these sorts of things (especially with adults that are a big part of their lives). And the “not knowing” what’s going on can easily lead to some kids thinking that it’s them (and not some other event that they really don’t understand).
We didn’t close at 9/11 or after. I was glued to the radio and was kind of surprised that that wasn’t the case with most co-workers. I worked right by O’Hare and it was creepy with silence, as you’d normally hear airplanes flying almost constantly.
The hysteria was interesting. My daughter was in daycare at the time and they moved all the kids because the building was really-not-all-that-close to a 16-story suburban office building of no particular note.
My office was 2 blocks from the WTC. I came out of the subway shortly after the second plane had hit, first saw the long line of emergency vehicles then saw the buildings up close. I was living in NYC at the time, was about a 7-mile walk back to my place. Didn’t see anyone jump or buildings coming down.
My wife at the time was in tears, of course relieved that I was ok. I had cable modem at that time while most other people were still using phone lines, so I could reassure my family that I was ok. Took 2 days before our chief actuary could reach me, relieved to find out there were no casualties from our office. We spend the next several weeks doing a combination of WFH and working out of our NJ office. By November we were working out of a facility in Jersey City right by ISO headquarters. We could have moved back into our office by December but the underwriters wanted to wait till 1/1 renewal season was over before moving back.
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that’s insane!
where did you go after you got out of the subway? Did you see the towers come down?
I walked towards our office, at that point there were a whole bunch of people standing and watching. A few minutes later there was word that another plane was at large (this was the one that crashed in PA) so I figured it was best to head back home. I didn’t actually see the towers fall, but I heard a faint noise behind me, looked back and saw that both towers had fallen. Some of the chatter I heard involved comparisons to movies such as The Siege and Independence Day. There was one guy yelling, “The end is near, repent, Jesus can save you, etc…”
which we were still scrambling in 2020 when that finally did happen with covid, but it worked out fine in the end and everyone could wfh. i never worked from home prior to covid.