I was woken up early in the morning by a phone call from my mother, who had likewise been woken up even earlier in the morning by a phone call from her family in the USA. Brent, who answered the phone, told me "she says somebody has hijacked passenger planes and crashed them into buildings all over America." Between the time I heard this and the time I got downstairs and turned the TV on, I was expecting that this would be the beginning of war on a global scale, a fear which subsequent events did not manage to dispel until a good few days later.

I stayed in front of the TV for the next couple of hours, and had much the same reactions everybody else did to what I saw there. I brought the laptop into the living room so I could check that my friends at Rinkworks were still alive -- at this stage I had not yet pinned down exactly where all these scenes were happening, and still had the idea from my mother's call that it was a nationwide attack.

After I found out the facts, as far as they were known at the time, I had the shock of my life in chat when I asked about Faux Pas (the only Rinkie I knew to be in New York) and someone said he worked nearby the towers and was there when it happened. Fortunately, they added in their next line that he was OK, but it was the worst and longest seven-second refresh of my life. Even several hours later, I was still shaky from that. I'd like to ask that next time somebody hasn't actually been killed, people could maybe make that information their *first* comment for those of us on crappy dial-up connections.

Eventually it was morning and I had to go to work. I was on one of the very large ferries that day. The TVs on the boat were going all day, so I saw those scenes repeated constantly. Every half hour, at each end of our route, another 600 shell-shocked people in various stages of emotion, from political concern from utter trauma, would get on the boat, race for the TVs, and start talking about it all over again. Most people, like me, were still afraid that this would mark the start of either a world war or a nuclear exchange.

Probably the second hardest thing I did that day was trying to explain to a little kid what was going on -- I figured it wasn't really my responsibility, so I told him some bad men had done the things on TV, but it was a long way from here and we were all safe, and he should go find his mum or dad to talk about it. I don't know where they were, or why they were letting him wander around the boat alone and see the TV images.

The first hardest thing I did that day was stopping myself and several bystanders from punching a woman in the head for her comment that "it's all *%&#ing Hollywood stuff, who cares, it's only Americans." (I have to say that this was the only unsympathetic reaction I heard, that day or any other time since, and I should also add that she was stoned and/or drunk and most likely didn't fully understand that she was seeing a real event.)

The other thing I recall from this time is banning somebody from chat (possibly this was a couple of days later) for extremely offensive anti-Muslim comments, and the aftermath of that on the forum.

The main thing which strikes me now, looking back, is that only two people's reactions were based upon ignorance and hatred, out of the hundreds -- probably thousands -- of people of all different backgrounds and nationalities whom I spoke to, overheard, chatted online with, saw at work, or otherwise noticed over the weeks of the crisis. Only two, and one was not in her right mind at the time. Terrorists just don't have a chance in a world like that.