[Updates below.]

Reposted from last year with some minor edits:

Austin is an hour behind NYC, so when I got in to work (five minutes late, as usual) it was 9am there.

It has always been my "system" to get into work and spend the first thirty or forty-five minutes surfing news sites and generally forcing myself awake. Right around the time the first plane hit, I noticed the Net was getting laggy--way more than usual. I checked the Drudge Report one last time, saw nothing out of the ordinary, and then bent down to check on some recently-delivered division mail. Just another Tuesday morning, one that I wished I was spending asleep in bed rather than in the office.

A few minutes later, I heard someone walking down the hallway from the section next to ours, saying something about New York, the Trade Center, and an explosion. I leaned over to listen, but that's all she was saying. Curious, I refreshed Drudge's site and got...nothing. Server error. Hrm. I checked CNN and it was down as well. Oookay... I browsed to all the major newsmedia's websites only to have the same thing happen. Really annoyed (and beginning to get worried), I checked Slashdot. And then there they were, two articles in a row, both stuffed with hundreds of posts, far above and beyond what the typical article gets.

About this time, CNN had put up a super stripped-down version of it's home page, just a blank white background and text. I began to wonder about my cousin who lived in Manhattan.

As people began to leave their cubes and talk about what was happening, I realized we had a TV with an antenna. I ran over to a supervisor's room, grabbed the set, plugged it in, and tuned the "rabbit ears" in order to pick up a local signal.

My co-workers and I gathered around the TV just after the second plane hit.
The complete confusion of the situation was enormous. No one knew what was happening, not anyone on the scene, not anyone in the air, not anyone around me. An employee kept repeating, "This is war. You know this is. Someone did this to us...this is no accident. It's a war."

Everyone watched the towers go down in shocked horror. People began to hit their cell phones, ringing friends and family. I simply sat there, unable to put myself in the places of the hundreds (thousands?) of people who had just fell 90 stories in a firey concrete maelstrom.

By now, no one was working anywhere in the building I was in. It seemed the whole floor was crowded around the TV, asking the same unanswerable questions.

I suddenly remembered how hungry I was, so I drove hell-bent to a Schlotzsky's which had a cable TV connection, ordered my food, and sat at the table nearest to it, turning up the volume. The lunch crowd grew fast, a tension I've never felt in the air. Not a single person said anything while we ate. I don't think anyone knew what to say. We just listened to the announcers and occasionally turned up the volume more for the expanding crowd.

After lunch, I drove back to work, unable to expell the mental-engraved video of the planes ramming the buildings.

The rest of the day was spent in front of the TV, switching channels in order to find something new to hear about. The Net recovered, albeit slowly, and I would walk between PC and TV in order to reconcile what I had learned.
I remember watching the news at home that night, talking to my family about the safety of my cousin (who was alright), and thinking how much this was going to change the world.

I remember that day pretty fucking well.