This Thursday, window cleaners will be coming by my complex to…well….clean the windows. These are the types of luxuries you would expect given the cost of my HOA dues. UGH!!!

Anyway, I live about 30 ft up; not a huge complex but one cannot simply walk into my place and clean windows flat-footed. One would have to be hoisted up a few stories and dodge all the tress in order to Windex the Spew’s windows. In other words, not a simple task.

This got me thinking about window washers and the entire production of window washing; it is really worth it?

I mean in my little 5 story complex, there is a certain amount of skill and care that needs to be used to clean these windows. But that is child’s play compared to what window washers have to encounter when faced with a downtown skyscraper.

I mean have you seen these guys on their little cables and pullies, swinging around on the edge of a building? It looks like a Rocks N’ Ropes course in the middle of the city. The only difference; falling from this course leads to certain death. And sorry, that little helmet they are wearing will do no good.

Yes, death. These window washers risk life and limb everyday and for what? So Joe Exec can have a cleaner view of the other building right in front of him? It just doesn’t seem worth it. I mean how are these jobs marketed? The job description say something like ‘must highly value clean windows; low regard for own life preferred’.

I would think by this time, someone would have invented windows that can either clean themselves in some way or have a way of inverting the windows around so you can clean the outside part on the inside. You know, the safe part of the building?

I know these window washers are not dropping like flies from the sky. I am sure the probability of a window washer dying of heart disease is much higher than of falling down to the pavement. So that brings me some solace. But I think it is safe to say that once signing up for the high-risk/low-reward job of window cleaner, the probability of falling down from a building as being the cause of death greatly increases.

So I think we should live in a society that just accepts the inevitable fact that we will have dirty windows. We don’t need to entice the people in our world with an unnatural confidence of never falling to scrub our high rises for $25 an hour. It just doesn’t seem worth it.