Washing Windows
In a former life, before I went back to my old job, before I was a stay-at-home dad, before my old job was just my job, I was a consultant. This involved a lot of travel, the kind of fly out Sunday, fly home Friday travel eagerly tolerated by recent college grads who see it as a sign of prestige, but the kind of travel that slowly grinds you down until all the airports feel the same, no one concourse or food court or rental car counter in Chicago different from another in LaCrosse, Wisconsin.
My longest project as a consultant was in Melbourne, Florida, on the unloved Atlantic coast of the state, distinguished only by its proximity to the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral and its easy access to half a dozen full-nudity strip joints in Cocoa Beach. Getting to Melbourne meant flying to Orlando then renting a car and driving an hour to the coast through the bland marshland of central Florida. After one particularly grueling Sunday evening of flight delays and lost luggage, my team gathered in a group bitch session the next day at work. As a way of bucking up the team, my manager (who also happens to be my manager at my new/old job, long story) told a tale about a hunter who was hurt and lost in the hinterlands of Canada, and was forced to cut open the carcass of the elk he had just killed and sleep inside, amidst its still warm entrails, to avoid freezing to death (possibly apocryphal, since this is exactly like when Han Solo cut open a ton-ton and stuffed Luke Skywalker inside for the same reason in The Empire Strikes Back). “As bad as that trip was last night,” he explained, “At least you’re not sleeping in an elk.”
He was right. Not much could compare to sleeping inside an elk carcass, and it made our travel headaches seem trivial. The story became an instant mantra for our team, repeated after every delayed flight or missed deadline. Later that summer, we embellished that story after reading a news article about the hoof and mouth disease that was currently ravaging the livestock herds of Great Britain. Some poor slaughterhouse worker contracted the disease when a bloated, rotting sheep carcass exploded nearby and he accidentally ingested some of the remains. “At least we’re not sucking on sheep entrails,” went the saying, which we repeated with more glee than the elk version, even as the project dragged on and either of those alternatives started to seem less and less gruesome by comparison.
The weather was atrocious this Thursday in Chicago–rainy, foggy, temperatures in the 40s, like the beginnings of spring deciding to lay back down after the hangover from a long winter made things spin a little too much. I took the picture above outside my office building that morning. The men in question were window washers, and as I peered up the side of the green glass building to follow the ropes dangling from the 12th floor, I thought, “Man, I hope those guys don’t have to wash windows today.”
I’ve done a lot of complaining about the circumstances that find me working inside that building again, but no matter the compromises that resulted in my being there, I’d still rather be inside. I’m sure a certain kind of person could find a certain kind of peace hanging from a rope, 12 stories in the air, methodically washing pane after pane of glass with the swish and squeak of a sponge and a squeegee, but not me. When I start longing for my former life at home, getting heartsick about what could have been, I always have a watchword for (re)gaining perspective. At least I’m not sleeping in an elk. At least I’m not washing windows in the rain.
