Definitely in the Cruel tradition.  And very creepy.  I've seen some of these before, and they still give me the willies.

Wow, why does that always make my stomach turn?

I think it was a reflex.  But not one to stay in control of your destiny.  If you had a wall of fire bearing down on you and your only way out was an open window, while standing in said open window trying not to fall out would you not instinctively fling yourself out when it got too hot behind you?

I have no idea what I would have done.  I'm not sure I would have opted for staying there and burning to death.  I don't know, and I don't want to know.

I think the woman that jumped with her purse was likely thinking about hoping to be identified...I could be wrong...

I awoke that morning with the radio reporting an airplane had hit the towers.  I thought "shit, private plane, cloud coverage".  Then the report came of the second.  It took me about a second to figure out that this was related to the 1992-3 attack... (My brother in law was working there then)

I borrowed a TV when we got back in that day, as we were out at a friends farm helping them out.  The farm was right under the flight path from the airport, and it was dead silent except the occasional ANG fighter scrambling.
I watched the pictures of people flinging themselves out, and it was the absolute worse thing I'd seen on TV.

"Life during wartime"

I was at work downtown Baltimore...sitting at a desk at a job similar to the one I have now.  I was going through a divorce...stressed, depressed.  I was checking the news online, and saw a one paragraph article saying "Plane hits tower of world trade center".  I passed the link on...and we scrambled to a tv in the conference room...where I watched the 2nd tower collapse live, on tv.  I saw people jumping out of the building, in real time..haunting.  My coworkers and I all stood in silence.  The boss said we could all leave for the day due to our proximity to DC (after the Pentagon got hit).  They shut down all of Baltimore and DC.  There was no way out of the city, aside of on foot.  We worried what was coming next, so I hoofed it the 2 miles to the Interstate, where my brother who worked south of the city was on his way back home as well - he stopped to pick me up.  It took 2 hours to go 10 miles home.  Cell phones didn't work.  It was absolute chaos.

At home we all wondered how we would have found each other should something have happened to scatter us all....without cell phones. 

I bought a copy of each newspaper the next day with all the WTC headlines.  I'm not sure why...

I worked in IT at a marketing company that handled a major hotel chain's customer loyalty program.  The week after 9/11 we were about to do a mailing to a huge list of people we had gotten from several different airlines and realized we had to remove all addresses for people lost on the planes or anything with a zip code at or close to the towers.  The best the airlines could come up with in short notice by way of passenger lists were Excel spreadsheets.  I got the happy job of manually going through the spreadsheets record by record formatting the data so we could do a match/purge against our mail list.  What really made it rough was seeing instances of several matching last names in a row such as "Mark Williams, Jennifer Williams, Tommy Williams, Becky Williams" and realizing that was a mom, dad and their two kids blown up by those bastards.  The lists included the terrorists' names as well.  Believe it or not one of them had even signed up previously for the customer loyalty program.  Not sure what he was thinking...  "Hey!  If I stay at a Hyatt just five more times after I crash into the WTC building I'll get an upgrade on my next stay!"

jumped into my truck

I can't believe Taint drives a truck, how butch!

Driving to work - the news announces the first plane hit the towers, talk show hosts assumed it was a small private job.   By the time I get to work in the heart of the OC we are in full tilt conflagration.  Watched it all at work, got to make the phone calls to tell everyone to stay at home.  Had to try and explain it to the kids when I got home.

Oddly enough I remember marvelling at how precisely the towers blew out and came down.  If I didn't know first hand what a cluster fuck our government is I'd be tempted to side with the conspiracy nutjubs; distrust Bush enough to still feel that way on occaision.

fnord wrote:

...people using expletives were bleeped.

I am wondering if I have some sort of block about this occurring. How is it that they could have been heard? (distance, Doppler effect, lack of directional audio) Why would someone taking his or her own life in that manner be doing anything more than screaming, if they can catch their breath? (accidental deaths utter obscenities if they have the time, not forced suicides...unless we want to go with the 'I Wannid ta Be Onna Teevee' approach) They may, indeed, have been saying something, but I don't think it was censored for being comprised of foul oaths. Just a thought.

Roger_That wrote:

It took 2 hours to go 10 miles home.  Cell phones didn't work.  It was absolute chaos.

At home we all wondered how we would have found each other should something have happened to scatter us all....without cell phones.

One of the things I'm still puzzled about six years later was that the Emergency Broadcast Network never kicked in.  If ever there was a time for its use, that was it.

Oh, wait.  Bush was already in office.

pALEPHx wrote:

fnord wrote:

...people using expletives were bleeped.

I am wondering if I have some sort of block about this occurring. How is it that they could have been heard? (distance, Doppler effect, lack of directional audio) Why would someone taking his or her own life in that manner be doing anything more than screaming, if they can catch their breath? (accidental deaths utter obscenities if they have the time, not forced suicides...unless we want to go with the 'I Wannid ta Be Onna Teevee' approach) They may, indeed, have been saying something, but I don't think it was censored for being comprised of foul oaths. Just a thought.

Perhaps I wasn’t excruciatingly precise enough in my language, as I foolishly assumed most of the regulars understand English.  It apparently wasn’t clear to a few dense individuals that the people jumping and the people using expletives were two separate groups.  I shall go into more excruciating detail and explain it was a comment on America’s whacked out moral standards; it is ok to show gore, violence, and death. However sex and bad language on TeeVee are considered beyond the pale.

Hey Happy 10-31,

When I used to run charters under the GG Bridge the code for a jumper was 10-31.

The leg landed outside the Cafe Europa, where people initially thought it was a Friday the 13th joke. A man from Staten Island "saw the leg hit the ground" and said one of the women in his tour bus "took a picture."

http://gothamist.com/2007/04/14/i_saw_the_leg_h.php

fortinbras wrote:

Years ago, Frederick says, a colleague of his set up an experiment where he subjected laboratory animals to excruciating pain. They could go into another chamber to escape the pain, but if they did they would get their heads chopped off. Other lab animals were allowed to observe this, so they knew what would happen. They, too, were placed in the pain chamber. They leaped out of it, into the killing one. "The urge to escape the pain," says Frederick, "overrode everything else."

Nice! But according to Christians animals can't think...I'd love to see that colleague submit his report that he was going to do it before the experiment.

That doesn't prove they can think, you moron.  Every living being, through evolution, is programmed with a survival instinct.  My kid has a pet gecko.  If I stick my hand in the cage, it will burrow under a rock.  Does that mean it's thinking?  Fuck no.

headkicker_girl wrote:

fortinbras wrote:

Years ago, Frederick says, a colleague of his set up an experiment where he subjected laboratory animals to excruciating pain. They could go into another chamber to escape the pain, but if they did they would get their heads chopped off. Other lab animals were allowed to observe this, so they knew what would happen. They, too, were placed in the pain chamber. They leaped out of it, into the killing one. "The urge to escape the pain," says Frederick, "overrode everything else."

Nice! But according to Christians animals can't think...I'd love to see that colleague submit his report that he was going to do it before the experiment.

That doesn't prove they can think, you moron.  Every living being, through evolution, is programmed with a survival instinct.  My kid has a pet gecko.  If I stick my hand in the cage, it will burrow under a rock.  Does that mean it's thinking?  Fuck no.

Yes, but this study had the animals assuming to observe a reaction to a stimulii which wasn't from their own body.  While you are correct in the gecko running is survival instinct, the animals running from the pain doesn't prove that they understood they would go to certain death.  Personally I don't think they understood the concept as well of what was going on, however the experiment was lined up in the assumption that some sort of deductive reasoning was present.