Going to Great Panes to Shine : Window Cleaner Is Hanging Around So High-Rise Can Have a Clean Image
Mike Gaynor has this thing about having a boss look over his shoulder. He doesn’t like it. So he’s positioned himself in a job where he won’t have to tolerate it.
Gaynor, 23, of Bright Shine Window Cleaning Co., is up there alone scrubbing Symphony Towers, soon to be San Diego’s tallest building at 34 stories. And he’s doing it while sitting cavalierly on a 2-foot-long, 1-foot-wide wooden slab suspended by a thin network of cables tied into the upper reaches of the building.
Gaynor will be hanging around the tinted windows of the first six floors of B Street’s Symphony Towers through the middle of next week, and will spend a total of about 24 hours tending to every inch of glass with a hand-held, boar’s hair scrub brush and Squeegee. He’s going to be sure that the windows will shine like new, even though the complex is not scheduled to be completed until early 1989.
Why are the windows on the $143-million complex being cleaned now?
“So that everyone who walks by will look up and say, ‘What a pretty building’--not ‘What a dirty building,’ ” said Craig Millen, director of marketing for Charlton Raynd Development Co., whose brainchild is going up at 7th Avenue and B Street.
Most onlookers would shudder at the thought of trading places with Gaynor, who hangs high in the sky with only a hard hat for protection.
“If my mom were here, she’d probably kill me,” he said. “She wants me to get my feet on the ground and be a waiter or something.”
But, after four years, and despite two “close calls” where a rope slipped, Gaynor thinks little of the dangers of cleaning windows and would prefer not to even wear the required hard hat and work boots. “If they (the construction workers) drop something on me, then I’ll be dead anyway,” he said.
Originally from Fresno, Gaynor said he likes being a window cleaner because he does not “get stuck in the same place all the time” and instead has the opportunity to work with different people.” He finds his $25-an-hour job pretty exciting. He also enjoys seeing the entire building clean when he finishes a project.
Last year, although, he admitted to being a bit frightened when he embarked on cleaning a 52-story building in Hawaii, the highest structure on which he had ever worked. He cleaned all the windows of that building with only one co-worker, each on their own platform--called a boatswain--for three hours at a time.
Besides occasional frights, there are other drawbacks to being a window cleaner, he said, such as not being able to go to the bathroom or take a coffee break.
Gaynor does not like working on motorized scaffolds, which he terms unreliable, “because they are slower and because their motors break down.” He prefers to hang in the air in shorts and tennis shoes, listening to a portable radio and relying on his 5,000-pound test rope. The only time he will come down is if it begins to rain, he said, adding that he would work through even an earthquake.
During his window-cleaning experience, Gaynor has Squeegeed soapy water from the glass and seen “a lot of different people doing a lot of different things,” some of them embarrassing. He said he has seen houses full of garbage, marijuana plants and activities reserved for the bedroom taking place as he scrubbed away.
When he is washing a window, Gaynor uses the accepted window cleaner’s “fanning technique,” which a friend taught him several years ago. The youngest of the seven cleaners at his company, Gaynor said he considers himself the second-fastest.
Although he enjoys his job, he said he is now “getting older and more responsible.” He said he plans to enter Mesa College later this month, where he hopes to study property management.
Of course, he said, he is not going to quit window cleaning cold turkey. He plans to continue hanging around to work his way through school.
