I live in Rhode Island and work in a suburb of Boston. I have a brother who works in lower Manhattan. Just as I sat at my desk (about 8:55) a coworker said a plane had hit the WTC. I have to admit, I sort of laughed thinking it was some inexperienced rich guy in a 4 seater. I tried going to Boston.com to check it out but all websites were REAL slow. I decided to call my brother and he answered right away. He said that when he came out fo the subway there were all burnt papers landing on him and stuff and, embarrassing now, we both laughed. He thought the same thing I thought, just some idiot in a small plane. As we continued our discussion for a few minutes, we were both trying to get on-line to see something, we laughed and joked. We have talked about it since and, while we feel bad that we found humor in any type of accident, we certainly didn’t have ANY idea about what was going on.

Since I work for a financial company, all of our calls are recorded. I have since pulled the call and listened to it numerous times. The laughter stopped quickly when my brother interrupted the conversation with, “Oh my god. Our whole building just shook. We just heard an explosion and our whole building shook!” His wife immediately called on his other line (she was home watching on tv) and he conferenced her in. She was relaying what was happening from tv. After some confusion on tv, it was made clear that it was a second plane. My brother said he was going to go check it out. Approx 30 minutes later, a coworker told me the 1 of the WTC towers had just collapsed. That was when I first felt fear. I knew my brother was down there and, without tv or internet, I didn’t know if it fell over, collapsed, exploded etc. I immediately went to our cafetaria where our company had it on tv.

I sat in shock as I watched the 2nd tower fall. I was fortunate enough to hear from my sister-in-law within 1.5-2 hours. My brother had walked down, checked it out and gone back to his office before either tower had fallen. He was told to stay in his building until 11 and they were finally let go. He walked over the Brooklyn Bridge and was able to get home withing a few hours. Luckily I have that tape of our conversation for history sake, but even without it, I would never forget ANYTHING that happened that morning.