I know I'm a bit late to this party, but here's mine.

I was at work, I worked at a Navy base at the time, just got hired civil service almost exactly a month before, after spending a little over a year there as a contractor employee. Anyway, my wife called me and told me that both towers had been hit by planes and the local radio station was having fun with the situation, so I thought (and I believe the local radio station DJ's believed something similar as they were VERY apologetic the next day since they had no idea what was going on) that it was two commuter planes that swerved to avoid each other and instead ended up one in each tower. About an hour later, I was called to the large conference room by a fellow coworker who said, "You gotta see this!". Went there, the room was dark and the projector screen was on CNN news. They were rehashing things and I saw the one tower with smoke pouring out of it, then they continued the rehash in "realtime" (i.e. they didn't splice the scene together to compress the time) which showed the plane, at this point it was clearly a passenger jumbo jet, plowing into the other tower. At that point, I knew it was no accident as I first, naievely assumed. As we were watching the confusion on the news, they broke in (interrupting a second rehash trying to make sense of what was going on in NYC) that there was smoke coming from the Pentagon. Well, I had been following a series of articles on the renovation of the Pentagon's HVAC systems in a magazine called "Engineered Systems", being an HVAC engineer myself, and I thought that something went wrong there and that it was one hell of a coincidence (and just shows how naieve I can be). Within 1/2 hour CNN confirmed that the Pentagon was struck. Not long after this, I noticed the supervisors scrambling to find out what precautions were coming.

There was no word what precautions were being taken until about 1/2 or more of the base had emptied for lunch (which was normal except that on this day everyone seemed to leave for lunch all at once rather than staggered) and by 11:30 the base had been declared "closed" and noone could reenter unless they were considered essential. Although I was not considered an essential employee, due to being one of a handful of facilities engineers left in the department that day, since I didn't go to lunch, and the possibility of there being an attack at the base, I was not dismissed early like the majority of the rest of the base. Since the terrorists were not targeting military bases, I had an otherwise uneventful workday.

Communications were horrible. I could not get in touch with my wife until just before getting ready to leave. The only way we could communicate was via email. I take back my second sentence, I was able to get a brief call through to home and left my wife a message (since she was at work and could not get through to me via her cell phone, either) to check the email and that we could communicate through email. My wife works part time and when she got home and listened to the message and checked the email, she sent me a note to let me know she got the message and my email. Landline or cell phone, the circuits were completely overloaded and made communication very difficult.

Paul