I believe it was sometime after the pickle factory, canning
factory, volunteer coordinating, driving, house cleaning, and furniture moving,
and sometime before, more driving, railroading, and being a paralegal, that I
did my stint as a window washer.
Over the years I had also managed to pick up a history degree from the
University Wisconsin-Milwaukee, which had few tangible employment benefits. So
in order to keep the wolf from the door, I took a $6.00 an hour job washing
windows and risking my life, on average, once or twice a week.
My first day I reported to work and was given a gray work
shirt with the name of the company on the back and someone else’s name over the
front pocket. The guys who did
this job for a living were a fairly surly bunch, especially around starting
time. They weren’t on the bottom
rung of the employment ladder but they could see it from their perch. They weren’t openly hostile. They just
left the impression they didn’t know you and didn’t really care one way or the
other. In their defense, I suspect
they looked at me and figured, here was another kid who was going to flee the
job just as soon as something better came along. In my case, they were right and I lasted about eight months
before getting out.
We would meet up at 7:30am at the office and find out whom
we would be working with that particular day and where the job was
located. To this day, I am still
rather astonished how the workday often unfolded. We would get to the job site at 8:00am and work till around
10:00, when we would all pile in the truck and drive to the closest tavern (In
Milwaukee that is always a short drive).
The crew would then proceed to drink for an hour or ninety minutes,
before returning to the job site.
Around 12:30 or 1:00 we would go to lunch, often at a bar, and more
drinking was in order. In the
afternoon the lifers were friendlier and a bit more talkative. I never really got to know these guys
away from work but the profession seemed to have a rather high percentage of
alcoholics climbing around on those ladders. They looked as if life had treated them roughly and every
now and then, one of them would get fired for disappearing from work for a week
or two while they went on a bender.
Whenever anyone finds out I worked as a window washer, their
first question is, “Did you ever work on a skyscraper?” I understand the question and why it’s
asked. A lot of people have a fear
of heights and the thought of dangling way up there in the sky is
terrifying. The fact is, working
on a modern skyscraper is a lot safer than many of the jobs window washers do
every day. On the tall buildings
there are well-maintained, redundant, safety systems in place. For example, on
some buildings there are tracks attached to the building along which the stage
(the stage is the oblong or square object you see the window washers standing
in when they are up thirty or forty floors) is raised and lowered by remote
control. In addition to the stage,
each of the workers is wearing a safety belt. If, in the highly unlikely event, the stage should somehow
fall, the worker will dangle by the safety belt until rescued. One of the first
things you learn as a window washer is a fall from 500 feet or a fall from 50
will bring about the same result, a funeral. Crawling around an old, poorly maintained building, or
climbing ladders perched on unsteady surfaces, or having to stand on the very
top rung of a ladder to reach the top of a window is far more dangerous than
going up and doing the windows of a skyscraper. By the way, I did spend one day washing windows on a
38-story bank building in downtown Milwaukee.
 |
| Piece of cake! |
To illustrate the point, I will tell you a story about a job
I did that had me thinking about it for a few weeks. One day, I and another window washer were sent to an
apartment complex to wash the tall windows above the entrance to the
building. Just above the doors
there was a small-pitched roof and above that two, two story high windows. In order to clean them, it was
necessary to place the legs of a ladder on either side of the pitched roof and
climb to the top to wash the windows.
There were two windows. So it seemed logical we would each
clean one while the other guy held the ladder in place. To complicate things a bit, there was a
bit of a gusty wind blowing. It
wasn’t quite enough to be too concerning but it did add to my unease. Our first decision was who would go up
first and I volunteered on the theory that if I went second I would spend all
the time my coworker was aloft worried about taking my turn and thus be
miserable for twice as long. So I
went first.
When I got to the top, I made sure that when I reached out
to the right, I would put weight on my left leg to balance the ladder. When I had to reach out to the left, I
reversed the weight shift. It was
a job for total focus because a mistake would get you a landing three stories
down on a concrete surface. As I
finished my window, I remembered climbing down and experiencing a rush of
relief that all I had to do now was hold the ladder. That sense of relief vanished quickly as my coworker went up
the ladder and I begin to realize I now had another life in my hands. If I were to let the ladder slip or if
my buddy did something wrong and fell, I didn’t know how I would cope with the
result. I found holding the ladder
to be every bit as nerve wracking as going up to the top.
Afterword when we were back in the truck, I thought about
how going up had been scary but having another person’s life, at least
somewhat, dependant on you had been equally unsettling. I had not expected those feelings when
I volunteered to go first, thinking I could relax after my stint at the top was
over. It made me think about that
sort of responsibility for a few weeks afterward.
One afternoon we got word that one of our coworkers had
fallen about 25 feet. He was one
of the few young guys on the job and all we knew was that he had been taken to
the hospital. As it turned out, he
was released about four hours later, bruised and sore but otherwise all
right. He luckily had fallen on a
grass lawn and it seemed like one of those stories about guys who walk away
when their parachute doesn’t open.
When I heard the details I shuddered because he fell washing the windows
of the same bank I had washed the previous month.
Not all the jobs were dangerous. There were times when we would get sent to a mall to spend
the day washing the stores windows.
We called that leatherwork, as in shoe leather, because we worked on the
ground. Give me a great people
watching venue and air-conditioned comfort over scrambling up and down ladders
in the heat any day.
One day I was sent, along with a small crew, to do the
inside windows of a floor of an office building. It was one of those old time office set-ups with a secretary
pool on one end, a lot of desks in open spaces, and a few enclosed offices not
far from the secretary pool area.
This was back in the days when more people smoked and there were no
workplace rules preventing anyone from lighting up when ever and wherever they
felt like it. As we entered the
floor, I noticed the space looked rather shabby and the light had a murky
yellow quality to it. When we
started to wash the windows the tar and nicotine and whatever other poison is
in cigarettes started to stream down the windows. There were actual clumps of tar that had to be scraped off
with a razor blade. It was truly
disgusting. The sight of that gunk
rolling down those windows would have made a great public service anti-smoking
ad. When we finished the floor
looked palatably different. The
light was brighter and everything looked considerably better when it wasn’t
observed through a filthy yellow filter.
I imagine the workers liked their workspace a little better, until they,
once again, smoked it into darkness.
 |
| I don't remember the rainbow. |
The job that signaled the beginning of the end of my
window-washing career started when, one morning we were told we were being sent
to do the windows of a steel warehouse.
It was a big job and the guys who had been working it had fallen behind
so extra people were being devoted to the job to help them catch up. The building was four floors above
ground and two floors below for a total of six stories. The four stories above ground were made
up entirely of glass and steel girders.
When we got to the job site, we were divided up into pairs
and told what part of the factory we were to tackle. My partner was a Native American who was the combination of
almost all the stereotypes our culture reserves for Native Americans. First, he had the classic Plains Indian
face. He would have been an
extremely handsome man but for the scars and bruises that reflected a hard
life. He was at home in high
places and was a picture of confidence, agility, and grace walking the girders
several stories above the ground.
I found out later, he did have a problem with alcohol, but when he
disappeared on a bender his job would be waiting for him when he got back. He was an ex-marine and it was
one of the fortunate things in my life that I was paired up with him that day.
The section we were assigned was four stories above the
ground. We were lifted up in
a cherry picker to a boom of a crane that had been extended toward the
windows. We crawled along the boom
until we were able to pull ourselves up on to a 20-inch girder. From there we would move left to right
cleaning the windows until we came to vertical girder. That is where the real challenge began.
My partner demonstrated what needed to be done to get to the
next section of windows. He
grabbed the vertical girder with his right hand and swung out and around and
landed on the girder on the other side, all the while carrying his five gallon
bucket with his squeegees and sponges in his left arm. My four and half regular readers know,
I will never be nominated for the Davy Crockett Bravery Award, so I don’t mind
telling you, this maneuver terrified me. I was good at baseball and to a much lesser extent
basketball and football but I sucked at gymnastics. Even circus performers get to practice dangerous tricks with
a net until they master the stunt.
Here, I was expected to work without a net, without practice and without
much, if any, native ability. I
found myself starring at the girder unable to make myself move.
My partner saw my predicament and came back and offered some
advice and tried to build up my confidence. I still could not make myself move. Finally he convinced me to swing out
and he would grab me and bring me around the girder and place me on the
horizontal girder. Out I swung and
he reached over and caught me and brought me around and literally placed me on
the horizontal girder. When the
maneuver was completed our faces were about twelve inches apart and he broke
out in a big grin. At the time I
though he was just being friendly and encouraging. As I think about it now, I think he probably was suppressing
a guffaw when he looked at me looking at him the same way the Lone Ranger
looked at Tonto the first time Tonto saved his ass.
We repeated this move every twenty to twenty five minutes
for the rest of the day. By the
end, my guardian angel was basically standing by to grab me if I didn’t quite
make it. I never worked with him
again but I do believe he probably saved my life that day. On the drive home that evening, I
decided to look for another job.
About three weeks later, I called to find out if I was going
to be hired by a company to drive vans, step vans, and small trucks around
metro Milwaukee delivering everything from envelopes to turbines. Ironically, the day I found out I had
the job, I had been sent to the same factory that had convinced me to seek
another career, to wash some windows that could be reached by ladder. I worked
till noon and then loaded up and went back to the office and quit. Dying on the job for $12.00 per hour
was one thing. Dying for $6.00 per
hour was against my moral code.
Next: The
Teacher says her piece.
