Where was I?

I made the mistake of turning on my radio at 8:50 this morning, but instead of the usual radio antics I am accustomed to, I was met instead with somber voices re-telling the tragedy that happened eight years ago. There are very few moments where you remember exactly where you were:Pearl Harbor, JFK's assassination ( I hadn't been born yet), The Death of John Lennon ( I was two years old at this point, and my parents weren't huge Beatles fans), and then there was 9-11-01. At the moment of impact, I was in my office, doing some paperwork, while the television in my office crackled and showed images of the towers through "snow" (To those of you not old enough to ever remember getting anything less than a digital signal via cable or satellite, snow is interference in the signal, usually due to atmospheric conditions.) When I saw the first plane hit, I literally dropped everything I was holding. Papers scattered everywhere and my knees buckled and I fell backwards into my desk chair and reached for the remote to turn the volume up, to find out what was going on. I watched, dumbfounded, as the second plane hit the second tower, and shuddered as I watched all those people falling or leaping to their deaths. I felt truly helpless, I didn't know what to do, who to call, or what to expect next. That was when Tony walked into the office. I fought back tears as I tried to explain to him what had happened, he was stunned, and didn't believe me, so we turned on the television in the front office so he could see for himself. As I watched the second tower crumble, I thought out loud that this was not the end of this, and minutes later a third plane hit the pentagon, and a fourth crashed into a field 80 miles from Pittsburgh. I felt helpless, and I didn't know what to do next. My first instinct was to try and call all of my friends in New York and New Jersey, because they all lived or worked near the towers, and to call family friends that live in DC because they work so close to the Pentagon. I couldn't sit through work that day. Shortly after the last plane crashed, I went home, curled up in the corner and did what most of us did, I watched close to 24 straight hours of Cable News. I would have liked to gone back to New York, and volunteered, but I really had no means of getting there, or back, nor did I have any search-and-rescue training. I felt helpless, and it made me angry. Before I did any of these things though, I called and wished my kid sister a happy birthday.