Yesterday I got a text message from my best friend B which simply asked if I could go round to hers today, all day. I said of course and asked why. She said she'd seen a train accident on Saturday night and didn't want to be alone.

So I took chocolate cake and went round this morning. It turns out this is the accident she was talking about:

A 16-year-old girl died after falling under a train while she was running alongside it on the platform

B was on a train going in the opposite direction which arrived into the station just seconds after the accident.  All the power was turned off and B sat in her carriage, which was level with the front of the other train, and watched as police and paramedics went to work.

The girl's best friend started screaming as soon as her friend fell.  B said she didn't stop screaming for over half an hour.  She says the scream is one of the worst things, she just cant get it out of her head.

The whole station was closed down for three hours.  B got talking to a girl in her carriage who was also from Brighton and this girl called her friends who immediately began driving the 45mins to the station to collect her and drive her to Brighton, B was invited to go along with her which she agreed to.  About 15 minutes before the friends arrived their train was cleared to leave so B, not wanting to leave the girl alone, got off the train with her and together they waited on the platform.

They were going to wait outside the station but a station employee told them they could wait on the platform and stay a bit warmer.  They sat and looked across to the opposite platform where the police were looking down at the tracks with torches.  B says that although she could hear their conversation and see clearly what they were doing, it took her a minute for it to actually register.  When she saw what they were doing down the tracks she grabbed the girl who she was with and dragged her out of the station.  A couple of minutes later the same station employee came out to apologise to them, he hadn't realised what the police were doing and the police had not realised there were any passengers left in the station, so they had not kept their voices down.

B is doing ok.  She burst into tears almost as soon as I arrived.  And again when she tried to read the article about it on the front page of The Argus.  But she managed to tell me all of the story above, along with a few details I have omitted, without crying.  And we carried on talking about it all day. She was doing much better by the time I left this evening.  In many ways she did better than me as I started crying when she was telling me her story!  I just hope she sleeps reasonably well tonight and is able to face tomorrow back at work. 

It is just beyond tragic.  What a horrific end to what was obviously a good night out for this girl and her friends.  Just a split second and suddenly everyone's lives changed around that one random event.


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Spoke to HP today, they tried to tell me the warranty didn't cover accidental damage so they wouldn't repair it.  I told them that was fine and dandy, but there was no accident.  It just stopped working: BAM! After arguing for a while they agreed to collect it tomorrow and will ring me when they've established whether it was user error - if they think it is, they will charge me for the repair.  Basically if they decide it was my fault, I dont have a leg to stand on, there is no way I can prove that all I did was turn around to plug it in only to turn back and discover it was broken.

I turned it on this afternoon and the bottom half of the screen has also gone screwy, I think the refresh rate has dropped through the floor for that half of the display, for god knows what reason.

All of which is stressful, when it needn't be, HP could just give providing good customer service a whirl instead of being arseholes on the phone and I'd be feeling a lot happier about sending it off to them tomorrow. Ugh.

Anyway, this is possibly the last NaBloPoMo entry I'll do, depends how inspired I am to painstakingly type html code out on my phone in order to have some sort of formatting.  We'll see.

Good wishes for B, the girl's friends and family, and hopes of a swift resolution of my HP problems dominate my thoughts this evening.