So my new job involves me cleaning windows.
I've thought about writing this blog a few times since I started the job, but have been too tired or lazy to get it done (the Halloween event for Guild Wars 2 and the release of Assassin's Creed 3 didn't make it any easier), but I have now committed to writing about my brief experiences as a window cleaner.
The company I work for cleans many kinds of windows. At first I thought we only did high rise stuff. We do, but that's not all (there's not a ton of sky-scrapers in Baton Rouge anyway,) we also do smaller businesses and a lot of residential stuff.
More on that later.
First of all, allow me to describe the two guys I've worked with so far in this new profession. Note that the entire company is made up for just five people, counting both myself and the owner, who cleans windows himself as well.
The owner, let's call him Mounds, is a tall, slight man in his fifties. He has a low, sort of mumbling voice and a badly dinged up truck. He's also very scatterbrained, it took him over two weeks to actually get me working after he told me he wanted me to work for him. I discovered literally today that he also plays classical guitar and has a side job playing that instrument at things like weddings. He also seems to be some flavor of Christian, although not Catholic, and devout enough to go on missions to places in Africa. Make of that what you will.
While I didn't work with Mounds when I first started, I've spent most of this week and a day or two of last week working with him on a lot of residential work. It seems he's the one doing the residential stuff for now, until he can find some replacement to take over the work for him. He's a good teacher, and a nice enough guy. He often puts me in the awkward position of having to ask him to repeat himself many times because he speaks so quietly, and can be somewhat passive aggressive about certain areas of my window cleaning that may not be up to snuff, but generally he's not too bad to work with.
The other guy whom I have worked with, and 25% of the company before I started, is a guy I'll call Paul. He's a short, stocky man in his late 30's with an impressive beard. He, I have learned, is an amature masked wrestler in his free time and drives all around the state on the weekends with a whole persona, mask, and music to wow fans of underground wrestling and demonstrate his martial prowess. I didn't believe him at first, but he's got tons of pictures and has shown me his wrestling gear.
It smelled of man.
Paul is a veteran of window washing, with over twenty-five years of experience wiping dirt off of glass and he has taught me the basics of the job in an admirable way.
For all the incredibly weird stuff these two dudes do, they both seem decent and kind and I don't really have any problems with them (aside from Paul's seeming racism, but that's another blog.)
So the job. Yeah. We do climb up some pretty high buildings, tie ropes to rickety metal structures held down with heavy weights and then jump off of the building to repel down the sides of the building and clean it. Those jobs are, so far, my favorite, because you're spending time up high above the stuff on the ground with nothing but you and the window (or side of the building, because we've done pressure washing too, although I didn't do that personally.) The biggest problem is sunburn, especially on the building we were working on last week, which had a highly reflective white roof. The sun beats down mercilessly on big buildings like that with very sparse shade to hide you from its cancerous rays.
I've developed a farmer's tan with alarming speed, and started wearing a baseball cap.
Soon I figure I'll be voting Republican and drinking Coors.
Other than the high-rise stuff we also do smaller businesses. Today I cleaned a small art gallery in Baton Rouge (I didn't even know they had art galleries here) that was just sort of built into a strip mall. Those sorts of jobs are fine because there's usually not too many windows and the ones they do have are usually large and without many panes. The art gallery was particularly awesome because it was all like ten foot wide windows with no frames at all.
Then there's the residential jobs.
Those kind of suck.
But they're also kind of awesome.
They suck because of a few reasons. The primary reason is because most of the houses we do have a lot of windows, and they're usually pretty small, pretty segmented and pretty dirty. Especially on the outside. The next time you're strolling around your house go take a close look at the corners of the exteriors of your windows.
Know what you'll see?
Fucking spiders.
I don't know why, but spiders fucking love nesting in the corners of residential houses, especially the kinds of houses we seem to do, which is to say houses owned by rich old white people with lots of plants that grow right up against the glass and give them happy little spider bridges to come and go whenever they want.
The houses are, as I said earlier, also owned by very wealthy people and so are very large, fancy houses. This is bad because it makes me angry and depressed, knowing I'll never get to live somewhere as nice as the houses I'm seeing.
One weird trend I'm noticing with these houses, though, is that these rich people have surprisingly small TVs, shitty computers, and lots of VHS tapes. I don't know if that's just because they're older or because when you're rich you have better things to do with your time than sit on the couch and watch TV or play videogames.
It's probably the latter.
Also most of these residential jobs involve both cleaning inside as well as the outside of the house. Entirely separate from the angry jealousy I feel being inside of the house is the pain of having to awkwardly walk around a house, moving furniture, squeaking squeegees around and hunting for missed windows while the owners of the said house are reading or cooking or whatever.
The jobs are kind of awesome for only two reasons, but one of them is pretty awesome.
The lesser of the two is that when you're cleaning interiors of houses you at least get the benefit of air conditioning and shelter from the remorseless sun.
The greater one is sometimes the people will tip.
And they tip big.
Just yesterday I got $40 for cleaning a woman's windows, and she, like most of the other residential customers, was very polite the whole time Paul and I were there, giving us water and telling us we were doing a good job and all that. The $40 though, that was pretty awesome. Paul told me I could make $100 or more just from working a few residential jobs in a day with some luck, so it pretty much makes up for all the headaches of prowling around fancy houses with a dripping brush.
The job is not hard, but it can be tough. The physical toll on my body is high, mostly because I'm a saggy, paunchy 26 year old who hasn't been remotely in shape since he was 20, and long hours and weeks kind of blow (I'm going to be working 14 days straight over the course of this and next week,) but the pay is good and the job itself isn't hard to accomplish and, most importantly, I hardly have to talk to customers or teenage assholes at all.
I do worry about how it will impact my writing. I've hardly written anything since starting. When I get home I'm so tired that I just want to sit around and read or play a game for a few hours before sleeping, but I'm hoping that as my body starts to shape up I'll have more energy for writing and other fun things.
And I can at least write shitty blog entries to keep me sharp until then.
No comments:
Post a Comment