The Man Outdoors

I was sitting in a nice, warm cafeteria on the second floor, eating my sandwich. It was stormy outside, and i was glad to be indoors. I had just finished reading a story (Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck if it matters) on my iPad. I leaned back and looked around. Next to me, rivulets of rainwater caught my eye, cascading unnaturally fast down the outside of the window glass. The windows must have been treated or cleaned with something that made water bead off them like silicone. It made the water speed downward quickly.

I looked across the way. Outside the next building over, three floors up, was a window-washer. I watched him for a while, watching and thinking about how nasty it was outside.

Just because it's raining cats and dogs outside doesn't mean outside jobs don't get done when they have to.

I don't have to tell that to the man standing in that little steel cage at the end of a boom lift. He held a long-handled window squeegee in his hands, methodically sweeping it up and down, side to side. No doubt wearing waterproof winter clothes, he's probably one of those guys that considers his glass as half full. Glad to be alive. He probably tosses little 'isms' around in his head as if to give credence to being on what many people would consider to be "the wrong side" of the wall. Maybe he's thinking such positive things as:

"It's pretty warm outside for this time of year."

"I love being outside on a day like this. It makes me feel alive."

"Mmm, the air smells good out here today--fresh from the rain."

"Look at those people inside that office--stuck sitting in their chairs all day long. Probably stressed out about some kind of report or deadline. Poor suckers."

He probably knows all the right things to wear and all the right ways to wear 'em. He probably has the art of layering down to a finely-tuned science. Wearing his brightly-colored safety vest, he was probably indifferent or uncaring to the additional layer of wind proofing that it affords him. Most likely a job requirement, he wears it because he has to.

Who knows, he may have aspired to be a window washer just so he could operate a boom lift. Looking through little boy's eyes, I can see him riding his bicycle down a cracked and uneven sidewalk, zig-zagging back and forth and doing wheelies off the broken edges of concrete. Occasionally he would loop way out to roll his tire over an empty can or some other crushable object. Suddenly, he rounds a corner and there it is: A brightly-colored boom lift with a man in the basket at the end of the long arm. It looked like he was a hundred feet up in the air. He was enthralled as he watched the man, rising and falling, sweeping back and forth as he pressure-washed the flaking paint off the dull yellow building, each time hearing the motor of the lift whine as he did so. The boy thought to himself, "Wow, that is the coolest job ever! I want to do that when I grow up!"

Or, I'm totally off the mark and he just got hired as a general laborer.
Boss:  "Hey Joe, take the boom truck over to that building and clean the windows. Don't give me any crap about the rain, just do it."

Whatever. I was just romancing the water running down the outside of the window.