Just being neighbourly

After reading this blog post over at The Supermercado Project, I was suddenly reminded of an anecdote about how wonderfully petty neighbours can be.

The story occurred to two friends of ours. Let's call them J & G. They were typical gamer geeks, just out of university, and because this was the early nineties they were both unemployed - youth unemployment was about 40% thanks to the recession we had to have. This meant that J & G had ample free time to spend on their hobby: gaming.

We're not talking about chess, checkers or monopoly here. We're talking roleplaying games. If you've never seen or played in one they basically involve a lot of talking, shouting and laughing. Not unlike parliamentary question time. Except they're about five times louder.

Anyway, J & G were sharing a flat in the inner suburbs of Perth and the landlady happened to live in the next door unit. She was old, unmarried and seemed to hold everybody else responsible for her unwediness. Thankfully I only ever met her the once. The Landlady didn't seem to understand the idea of roleplaying games and certainly didn't understand J & G's sleep late, game late attitude. Unfortunately for her, there was nothing she could do because J & G were always careful to never breach their lease requirements. So instead of buying a pair of earplugs or perhaps going out and getting a life she decided to act. She called the cops and told them that J and G were both drug pushers.

They weren't, but the police raided them anyway. The raid apparently took about fifteen minutes, they went through almost everything and all they found was twenty or so containers of Radiant detergent - J and G liked to buy in bulk. So the police left emptyhanded and the little old landlady was stuck with them for another few months.

Now there's a wonderful epilogue to this story, because unbeknownst to both the police and the landlady was that J & G were both avid pyromaniacs. What the police thought was powdered detergent was in fact a powdered explosive, that they had cooked up in their oven. I won't say the stuff was harmless but it was pretty mild stuff - weaker than gunpowder. From memory they used the stuff to launch homemade rockets over the ocean. If it had been found today they'd be straight on a C-130 bound for Gitmo.

Ah, for more innocent times.