Busy community!

For some random reason I became a member of customers_suck. Damn, there are a LOT of disgruntled employees out there. Employees who have to deal with the dreaded General Public... I estimate ten long posts a day - or more. Go have a look. I had to un-subscribe, I couldn't see the rest of my friends page.

Burning Down The House.

Yesterday evening, I was about to pop out to the gym. I had a quick look out of my window, which looks over the Westgarth part of Northcote - the area behind the Westgarth Cinema.

Something was producing a lot of smoke down there. A large round cloud of white smoke. In the time it took evildoom_bunny to step across the room to have a look, an even larger cloud of black smoke started pour out of what was clearly a house on fire. Flames started becoming visible, and grew to be about twice the height of the house pretty quickly.

We couldn't hear sirens, so we quickly pulled out a melways to see if we could work out where it was. evildoom_bunny guessed - correctly as it turned out - that is was a semi-abandoned ugly brick place on a corner. I called the fire brigade - something I'd never done before - and as soon as I said the suburb, the operator said "We're on our way to the corner of Union and George street." Which was exactly the spot I was looking at on the map. Someone had beaten me to it, thankfully.

We stepped onto the landing outside my flat and could clearly see some serious flames coming from the place. evildoom_bunny said she wanted to go have a look. I called her a rubber-necker and a ghoul, but dropped her off on the way to the gym.

By that stage there were four fire engines and two police cars on the scene (but no ambulances), and a pall of smoke covering about 300 metres in all directions about the place. evildoom_bunny will no doubt blog more about what she saw, but apparently she was one of quite a crowd!

The house had apparently had squatters in it, and was due to be demolished anyway. We tried to take a better look at it later, but they were still hosing it about two hours after we first saw smoke. They even had a fire investigation unit there.

I've always enjoyed the view from my flat, never thought it might actually prove a social service!