The window cleaner

There is a man cleaning the windows outside my office building. The rubber wheels on his carriage is bumping against the glass facade. It makes me slightly uncomfortable. “I could never have that job”, one of the secretaries says as we all look at the man busy scraping the windows with an over-sized window scraper of some kind. I walk closer to the window, starring at the man and the little metal box which he stands in. It’s attached to two thick ropes which end somewhere high above which I can’t see.

I return to my desk chair, the one I spend all my day in. I don’t envy the cleaner bumping along on our facade, but somehow the faint sound of his rubber tires moving along the building makes me feel like an animal in a zoo. An animal voluntarily caged. Voluntarily contained in this limited space. It’s a sad picture, until a violent rain stars to pour, and the zoo becomes a place of warmth and comfort. And somewhere outside, the cleaner continues, and I will never know what he sees when he looks in on us. Then the sound of rubber disappears.