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Comment by dgritsko | Hacker News Reader

Thank you for posting this. Everyone has their "where were you" story from that horrific day, but I never get tired of hearing them for some reason. Hard to believe it's nearly been two decades - I can still almost feel the chill in the air of that morning, it was an absolutely perfect fall day on the East Coast.

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There was a window cleaner trapped in an elevator between floors who used a squeegee to stab the plaster and escape.

When I last worked it out - he had about 7 minutes to escape the area of collapse. Intense when you're half way up a skyscraper with no working elevators.

Yeah it is impossible to forget. My wife at the time and I got a call waking us from a friend telling us to turn on the news. It was all surreal from that moment on. The second plane may have just hit the second tower by the time we turned on the TV and they didn't know quite what happened yet.

I am not even from the United States and I got a call to turn on the TV.

That was before the second plane. I couldn't believe it. We did have access to US channels and the reporters appeared to be confused when the second plane hit and thought it was a replay.

I've never lived in the US either, but I got a phone call from my partner who was panicking about George Bush starting WW3. I said that wasn't really a concern, it was just a terrorist attack and you can't really nuke terrorists.

To be fair, we never really know what some of the more loopy US presidents may do, though.

i've stopped thinking about it because I can't deal with the fact that it was nineteen years ago. Nineteen!

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