Saw it on the news in the morning- watched the 2nd plane hit, and at that point realized this wasn't any accident- so I better got to work.. heard about the Pentagon on my way in... (have about a 45min-1hr commute)

not that I could do much to help people there- I just new it was going to be chaos at work, since I worked on a financial network for a major telco..

most of our customers are stock brokers- spent the next week joining a conference call at the beginning of the day asking "what can I do" and just hacking away at technical issues all day.. until the stock market opened on the Monday following 9/11 (that day was a Tuesday, and all stock markets were closed the rest of the week.. even though we were technically ABLE to open markets on Wednesday- it was the right thing to wait)

the story of Cantor Fitzgerald was talked about on the news today- that particular one really rings with me, I was up late Sunday night turning up a redundant circuit to their sales office in CT, since all of their trading was done from the their offices in the WTC.. so they had a fully redundant network connection going into the 1st trading day post 9/11. There was a story about the CEO that happened to not be in his office when the 1st plane hit because he was dropping off his daughter for her first day of kindergarden- otherwise he would have surely perished.

I remember the people working in Manhattan that worked their asses off to get things as much back to normal as possible- I volunteered to go there, but planes were grounded for days, and they wanted me one the phones to work issues... but it's the first responders that deserve our respect for how they dealt with the situations..