On 9/11 2001 I still lived in Austria. I remember as it was yesterday: I was sitting at my desk at work in the afternoon, taking a break and surfing to a local news site. The main event was that an aircraft (supposedly a small, private one) had crashed into a tower of the World Trade Center. Then the follow ups... probably a bigger airplane than first thought...a fire difficult to contain... no, it was a commercial airliner. And then the news exploded on the website and the main event became the one and only event on the website (for the first time I think, every other news was taken off): a second plane had crashed into the other tower. It was still suspected by the Austrian news network that there had to be a mixup somewhere and somebody had gotten confused. So it was treated as a rumor ... at first. Then the confirmation. I was working as a technical manager in a call center at that time and one by one the phones went quiet as the calls dryed up. By then all employees had the webbrowser open. Then the news from the third plane into the Pentagon. Then CNN went out because the servers were overwhelmed. By then we all were thinking about World War III. People started calling to the US when they knew somebody there. Then the towers fell.
We finished the shift which was a pointless exercise since hardly anybody called anymore (people were glued to the tv). When I went home it was rush hour in Vienna, but you couldn't have known that from the empty streets. I had never seen such empty streets at that time of day. It was spooky. The next day most companies, ours too, observed a minute of silence for the victims of 9/11.
It had an incredible impact all over the world. All our institutions and embassies got reinforced police protection, which made most Viennese smirk a little bit: yeah sure, the terrorists have three targets on this planet - New York, Washington and Vienna, Austria. But I guess most cities in the western hemisphere reacted that way.
