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I remember where I was when.....

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  • #16
    My dad remembers watching the moon landing as a kid. His school sent everyone home early because they only had one tv. He went to a friend's house because it was closer and he wouldn't have made it all the way home in time.

    Mum doesn't remember watching it, but she does remember seeing the photos in the newspaper the next day. (Small not-wealthy country town that might have had 1 TV for every 10 houses.)

    The best thing we ever did on any of our family holidays was stopping at the Parkes Observatory in New South Wales and seeing the massive dishes and the equipment that was used to bring the signal back and send it all around the world. It was so cool to see all the old footage.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkes_Observatory
    A good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read. - Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!

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    • #17
      Challenger disaster:
      We were stationed in Germany at the time. We had brought our car to a local car repair shop to get a pressure test done on the engine to determine where the oil leak was coming from. We went after work to pick it up. The mechanic that has performed the test had already gone home. So the guy at the service counter called him at home to find out the results. We only heard one side of the conversation:
      "The clients with the car you pressure tested are here and want to know the results."
      "Oh yeah, yeah, that was today"
      "Oh wow, it exploded!"
      Cue me freaking out while he made a bit more small talk and did a few hmmm's and haww's, before he got of the phone and told me the mechanic had been watching the Challenger launch.

      9/11/01
      I was just starting on a service call to install locks in a new commercial building. There were a crew of masons still working on the facade of the building next to me. They had their truck pulled up and the doors open and were listening to the radio. When the announcer interrupted with breaking news.
      It was about the first plane that hit the north tower. At that point speculation ran wild but it was thought to be an accident. Until the other plane hit the south tower.

      Then they announced the hit on the pentagon. At that point it was clear it was a terrorist attack. They had announced the grounding of all planes. In the meantime I had moved a bit further down the building and couldn't hear the mason's radio as loud. What I did hear was a plane in the sky, so I looked up. The plane was heading west from PA into OH, then the pitch of the engines changed and it made a almost 180 course reversion, heading back east into PA.

      It was not until days later, when they were replaying the timeline of events on TV, that I realized that it was flight 93 that crashed in Shanksville, PA

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      • #18
        Kennedy Assasination, I was told I was in my highchair feeding myself while my Mom was ironing my Dad's Air Force uniform.

        First Moon Landing, Dad some me up to watch it with him

        John Lennon's murder, I was studying for a Microbiology test when the news broke

        Assassination attempt on Regan, I was sitting in the cafeteria at the high school playing Poker with my now husband as we were waiting on the school bus when a friend came in with the news

        Challenger, I was at work listening to the news cast on the radio

        9-11 I was at work listening to the radio when the news came across

        Columbia, I was escorting a group of community theatre kids between buildings when we heard the news

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        • #19
          2037... incredibly hot summer. You hardly think about it being a big deal now but it was huge headlines then.All out in the garden in our new little Pennsylvania Atlantic beach house with the kids having big summer party with the huge VRTV screen up for the live commentary on the very first successful time travel passenger flights...

          😒
          The Copyright Monster has made me tell you that my avatar is courtesy of the wonderful Alice XZ.And you don't want to annoy the Copyright Monster.

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          • #20
            9/11

            I was off work that day, but was scheduled to have classes at NVCC that afternoon/evening. I woke up late in the morning, came downstairs, and Mom looked up from the TV to tell me, "We may be going to war."

            Spent the rest of the day variously either watching the news and just trying to wrap my head around what had happened. Classes were cancelled, naturally, and my sister came home early from high school.

            Some of her schoolmates were outside for gym class when the plane hit the Pentagon. They could hear the crash.
            PWNADE(TM) - Serve up a glass today! | PWNZER - An act of pwnage so awesome, it's like the victim got hit by a tank.

            There are only Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse because I choose to walk!

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            • #21
              Challenger

              I was in 7th Grade. We were in our 'homeroom' right before lunch. Right before we got dismissed to go to lunch, the teacher disappeared, and came back to announced to the class that the Challenger had exploded on launch, with all the astronauts 'lost' but didn't go beyond that. The room next to us had a TV, that a lot of students where watching news about it from the hall, but I didn't really hear or see anything else until I got home from school and it was on TV.

              Columbia


              I just happened to catch something in passing about it, when I first turned the TV on. Turned to one of the cable news networks and they start talking about debris found in Arizona, and Texas, and telling people to stay away from it, if you find any. Watched it for couple hours while they were just getting the details in, and kept checking in from time to time the rest of the day to see if they had any more details.


              9/11

              I was working at an ISP Help desk, Primary for Cable Modem service, There was only 4 or 5 of us working at the time. Normal day in the morning for us, nothing out of the ordinary, then the manager came out of her office said that a 'small plane' hit the trade center, and she turned on the TV. I remember my office mates and myself having a discussion of wondering if was deliberate or not, and we decided that it looked like it was, because the plane had hit towards the center of the building. I don't remember seeing a second plane hit, i( might have taken a call or something) but I do remember looking at the screen not to long afterwards and seeing the damage on the second building. Then the TV started talking about reports of a 'fire at the Pentagon, and of a plane that had gone down in Pennsylvania. The phones just went quiet. I think I took 2 or 3 calls the rest of the day, and all of them was because they had problems with the news sites loading up. I do remember one lady had no idea what was going on, and when I suggested she turned on the TV, she turned it on, and was like 'oh crap.. Ok… Never mind then, I'll just watch this'.

              Princess Di

              Saw something in the late news about her being in a car crash, but no reports of her condition or anything. Got up the next morning, and grabbed the paper, and it had a big headline 'Princess Di Killed in crash'.

              Northeast blackout of 2003

              At home playing on my computer ( I worked 6a - 2:30p then) when the computer randomly rebooted when the lights flickered. Came back up, and then it shut down completely, as the power went out. Tried reporting the outage to the power company, and just got a busy signal. My wife called me on our home phone, and said that the power went out there (She worked roughly 20 - 25 miles south of where we lived) Turned on a radio we had, and nothing, as in none of the local radio stations are on the air. To be honest, that concerned me. After about 15 or 20 mins, tried and got one of the local stations. The DJ had gone to their studio at the transmitter tower location, had a generator plugged in that powered the mixing board, transmitter and was playing music of a portable CD player. He said he was getting reports of power outages up North as well as in the east. After about 45 minutes our power returned, so I turned on the TV, and they had a local live news report going from their parking lot, as they lost power in the studio, and since it was sunny, was using the light outside for their cameras. They bounced from local to National coverage that gave us reports of how big the area was that affected.
              Just sliding down the razor blade of life.

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              • #22
                Challenger explosion: I was in high school, and on a hall pass for some reason, and stopped in to see one of my history teachers who also ran the AV department. We were watching the launch live when it all went to hell.

                Columbia explosion: It was the morning of my little sister’s wedding. My fiancé and I were eating breakfast at our hotel in New Jersey watching it before the wedding.

                9/11: Woke up in my previous apartment to the knock of the cable repairman, and he was babbling on about the Twin Towers, and we had no idea what he was talking about...until he fixed the problem we were having and we watched it all from there on. We didn’t see either of the crashes, but we saw both of the buildings fall.

                Hinckley shooting of President Reagan: I was home sick from school watching TV, and watched it happen live.

                1997 Rose Bowl: I take sports with a grain of salt, as I realize it is entertainment, but this was the one game that about broke my heart. Ranked #2 in the nation, and one of the last two unbeaten teams left, Arizona State would have gotten their first national championship if they beat #4 Ohio State, and Florida beat #1 Florida State in the Sugar Bowl the next day. Well, Florida did their job, but it was a moot point for us at the time, as Ohio State, trailing for most of the game, and trailing with less than two minutes to go, and playing their backup quarterback (a kid from Arizona, no less!) beat ASU. We were in a major sports bar in Tempe, and when it looked like we were going to win, strangers were hugging and kissing and crying and laughing and going nuts. And then....silence. I still can’t watch the end of that game.

                Tuck Rule Game: Or as I call it, the Suck Rule Game. I was doing magic at the restaurant I used to do magic for, and I was dressed, as always, in my business casual attire, and remember watching that play and jumping up and down in joy at the apparent fumble and recovery, and then jumping up and down in anger at the subsequent ruling, all in my dress shoes.

                A couple happy ones....

                2001 World Series, Game 7: The Diamondbacks gave Arizona its first (and still only) championship in a major sport by beating the Yankees in a dramatic down-to-the-wire Game 7. The fringes of Hurricane Michelle were brushing Key West, and I was watching the game at home and chewing the end off of my couch.

                9/11/12: The one year anniversary of 9/11 was memorable for me for a different reason than most, and a happy one...it was the day I met my fiancé. My friend called me just after I had gotten off of work that day, and said, “Hey, my British friend is in town and we’re drinking at the Parrot...you should come join us. I think you two would get along.” So unshaved, and desperately in need of a haircut (so definitely not looking my best), I headed to the Parrot, and met a woman I found to be obnoxious and insufferable and sarcastic as all hell. She had a similar opinion of me. Ten days later we were engaged.

                "The Customer Is Always Right...But The Bartender Decides Who Is
                Still A Customer."

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                • #23
                  Challenger Explosion --



                  6th grade. I was in my regular classroom, and was a bit slower than the others putting my stuff away, so I was the last one out. By the time I was done packing, the room just down the hall (where were to congregate) had suddenly become eerily quiet. A teacher who had been sent to check on stragglers was like, "The Challenger. It blew up." We were affixed to the set for a while after, with the news showing it blow up, and the side rockets fly off, over and over and over again.



                  9/11 --


                  Programming class at a tech school. Word came down about the first impact during a brief break. Internet was massively clogged because everybody on the planet was trying to access CNN simultaneously. Someone got a feed via actual TV just in time for the second plane to make impact.
                  "For a musician, the SNES sound engine is like using Crayola Crayons. Nobuo Uematsu used Crayola Crayons to paint the Sistine Chapel." - Jeremy Jahns (re: "Dancing Mad")
                  "The difference between an amateur and a master is that the master has failed way more times." - JoCat
                  "Thinking is difficult, therefore let the herd pronounce judgment!" ~ Carl Jung
                  "There's burning bridges, and then there's the lake just to fill it with gasoline." - Wiccy, reddit
                  "Retail is a cruel master, and could very well be the most educational time of many people's lives, in its own twisted way." - me
                  "Love keeps her in the air when she oughta fall down...tell you she's hurtin' 'fore she keens...makes her a home." - Capt. Malcolm Reynolds, "Serenity" (2005)
                  Acts of Gord – Read it, Learn it, Love it!
                  "Our psychic powers only work if the customer has a mind to read." - me

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                  • #24
                    9/11

                    I was living on the other side of the country then and I didn't hear anything about what was going on during my ride to work. My carpool buddy and I shot the shit during the entire ride into work and didn't turn the radio on. It was not until I got into the shop that I found out what was going on, and even then I didn't believe it at first.

                    Incidentally, I was working in a shop that was doing refits and repairs for US military MECCs (mobile environmental cargo containers) at this time. Everything from replacing electrical to patching up holes in the canvas on these things (the sides of the container fold down and out and are covered with heavy duty canvas tent fabric that is then held up and out with metal ribs that you have to manually lug into place) - for an idea about what these are, click here. After spending the rest of that day sitting around the shop listening to and watching the news we spent the next couple of weeks hustling our asses to get as much of the refurb work finished because we knew it would not be long before the US military came calling for those MECCs, finished or not.

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                    • #25
                      Twin Towers: I had just gotten to the community college; the bus driver had the radio on and to be perfectly honest the coverage at the moment (when the first plane hit) sounded like a movie excerpt. I get into the building and the call comes to evacuate, one of my professors bundled six of us into his car when the shuttle bus filled up immediately. My mom called me when I was on the train platform and stayed on the line until I got inside the condo, then told me to get the cat carriers from the basement just in case. Our neighborhood is right along a Logan approach corridor. I had to go to work later and it was surreal...very little conversation and whoever was responsible for the stereo went back and forth between news coverage (only so much anyone can listen to, and even now I dislike seeing rehashed footage from that day) and 'ear candy' music.

                      Columbia: I was in college and my BF at the time was actually tracking the shuttle online. We didn't see anything in the sky (although chances were good that had we been outside we would have seen something) just that the radar trace vanished. Next day I see the front page of the local paper. Several professors that day either let students skip class with no penalty or cancelled entirely (lot of aerospace connections on campus).
                      "I am quite confident that I do exist."
                      "Excuse me, I'm making perfect sense. You're just not keeping up." The Doctor

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                      • #26
                        I was in the 6th grade and looking forward to lunch because actual cake was going to be on the menu.

                        I got pulled out of school because of the whole thing, and all I can remember from that day is that I was pissed I didn't get cake. I was pissed the whole rest of the school year because cake was not on the menu again, and I had missed the one chance to have it.

                        I was a pretty selfish kid.

                        Not to worry, however, because the television pretty much flashed the towers being hit and falling nonstop over the next months. It was uncomfortable and I got inured to it pretty quickly.
                        My Guide to Oblivion

                        "I resent the implication that I've gone mad, Sprocket."

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