North of the 49th parallel on 9-11:

I was working in my dept. (a library) for one of the big 5 international (now big 3) accounting firms in downtown Toronto, when a staff member who started work at 9:00 am, rushed into work horrified at seeing tv news monitor while going up our office building elevator, one of the towers hit by a plane.

Didn't actually see the news tv footage until I got home at 2:00 pm. and visited a neighbour who had a tv to watch. Office tower (over 40 stories high) was evacuated because people were genuinely afraid...it is in the financial heart of Canada where all head offices are located. The subway station was jammed with tons of office employees from other buildings plus government employees from provincial legislative offices. They too were advised to leave work early after lunch.

Durint that morning at work, news from various folks who surreptiously watched a tv somewhere in the building, we got snippets. Quiet, reflective. We tried phoning a sister library within our firm's NYC office. Later we found out she was fine.

Next day, company emailed across all our North American offices (there are 5,000 employees in Canada, over 50,000 in the U.S.), that 3 U.S. employees died onboard in the flights that hit the towers and the Pentagon. The 4th was a son accompanying his father-employee. Simultaneously the company rolled out a Lotus Notes database (easy to replicate the structure since this firm had tons of different Lotus Notes databases worldwide) where it was exclusively to express condolences, whatever. Messages were quite American-patriotic or religious.

And shortly after that email, we received an international internal directive that business travel was suspended for certain country destinations. The restrictions were relaxed a month later or so. Jeez, still gotta make money by seeing biz clients first. Then they changed the life insurance policy for business travel...

My partner was cycling across Canada himself. On that day, he wondered why the roads were quiet and walked into a bar in town of White River , northern Ontario. Everyone was glued to the tv screen on 9-11. Found out even the little charter planes up there were not flying.