Window washing? That’s ballsy. Nothing but rickety scaffolding and mere ounces of ballistic nylon straps between you and a plummet to death.
Two window-washers showed up tonight to clean the filthy windows in our office. They brought a harness but left it on the floor just outside my cubicle, where it stayed the entire time they stepped out onto the foot-wide window ledges of the seventeenth floor to swipe at the grime with a squeegee and soapy water while holding onto the sash with their free hand.
This window faces south; the skyscraper looming in the washed-out background, One Penn Plaza, ranks among the city’s top-20 tallest. Standing on our window ledges is not for the vertiginous.
It was windy out today and very sunny and it may have been hard to concentrate with some jackass inside taking pictures of them, but nothing fazed the window-washers. Probably if one fell, the other would be obligated to throw the harness out the window after him for insurance purposes.
“Where you guys from?” asked our not-especially politically correct office manager, after she casually mentioned that a man who lived in her apartment building hailed from Ghana. “Africa,” they said simultaneously and mischievously in accents I couldn’t place. The guy in the yellow shirt thought it was funny I was taking photos and even funnier when I offered to email them to him.
I must move beyond mere ballsiness in reference to these particular window washers and award them the Gold-Plated Brass Balls Award, with clusters and bonus testicle.