Weekend games

Saturday morning, I woke up as usual and headed to the gym, then, post-13k run, took a shower and crashed again. This is my normal weekend when I’m in town and not working. Unlike most mornings, I got jolted out of a semi-conscious state by the annoying beep of a smoke detector.

And thus began a solid half hour of The Beep Game.

You’ve played this. You hear that dang beep but can’t figure out where it’s coming from.  It doesn’t repeat itself quickly, so you can’t just hear it, start walking because you’re sure it’s not in the room you were in at the time, and hear it again. It becomes an audio cat-and-mouse game, and it’ll drive you nuts.

My apartment isn’t all that big, but it’s got three bedrooms with a smoke detector in each. There are two hallways, a long one and a short one. The long one, at the front door, connects the front door to the living room and the short one basically fits a radiator and my L.L. Bean rug. (Plug for L.L. Bean: it is an awesome rug, kind of Navajo-y, but I don’t see it on the website now.) The little hallway serves as the intersection of the three bedrooms. There’s a carbon monoxide detector there and a smoke detector in the long hallway, plus there’s a fifth smoke detector in the living room.

That’s a lot of potential beeps, and it’s not like this is the first time they’ve driven me nuts. However, I can’t ever remember which I’ve changed because it takes more than one or two tries to figure it out.  Saturday was no different. It went off once, signaling that I really should get going, and all I could tell was that it wasn’t loud enough to be the one in my bedroom. This meant that, although annoying, it wasn’t enough to actually drag me out of bed at that time. I had a long week and wanted to sleep late, plus I figured I deserved it after 13k.

Anyway, when I heard it again – with what seemed like a long but indeterminate amount of time in between – I figured I should get up and join The Game.

Eliminating the one in my bedroom still left four smoke detectors, and I really thought it couldn’t be the one in the long hallway or in the desk/closet room, since I really think I’ve changed those before. (The desk/closet room is, obviously, the one with the Drexel desk. I moved the Drexel bookcases in there and, since Turks don’t do closets, I bought a shower curtain rod and rigged it between the wall and the bookcases, providing a home to all my pants and suits.

I moved a chair into the little hallway and waited. It seemed the next beep came faster than it had before, but all I could then determine was that it didn’t sound like a bedroom one at all. I thought it came from the long hall, so I moved the chair and took it out, then went to make pancakes.

Pancakes are the weekend treat. I’m finally whittling down the huge stock of flour that I brought for some inexplicable reason. Today in particular, I used a ton because I made a triple batch of cookies for our guards.

As I was making the pancakes, though, I heard the beep again, so I changed the one in the living room, pulling the old battery out and sticking in the one from the long hallway. This was no easy feat because, as I learned, my living room ceilings are really high and my shoulder is not doing those “lift and twist a little” movements much at all. I tend to compensate by lifting my arm with the other arm, but for this, unlike, say, the little light above me on a flight, required two hands.

A few minutes after I completed the feat, the beep went off again – twice, like 45 seconds between. This made no sense because I swear when I sat in the chair in the little hallway, right outside all three bedroom doors, the beep came in front of me. And now they were coming irregularly! Since I knew I’d changed the one in the desk/closet room at one time, I started in the spare bedroom. Nothing doing, so I tried the one in my bedroom, even though I was absolutely positive the beeps hadn’t come from there.

The beeping continued, and at this point, the game was getting really old, since I’d changed the battery in every single smoke detector I had. By that point, I was tired of The Game but it doesn’t end until the beeping stops, and it hadn’t stopped. I started re-trying them and knew it wasn’t the long hallway one, when, as I was closing the little smoke detector face after changing the battery for the second time, the sound went off from behind me.

At that point, I wondered if random coincidence had drained two batteries at once, so I basically started taking the batteries out of multiple smoke detectors at once – and then, as I was in the hallway, I heard the beep next to me.

Not the smoke detector at all, but the carbon monoxide detector, which is on the wall outside my room. However, there is no way that’s what I heard earlier, since I had been sitting right next to it when I heard the beep in front of me, not to my right, left or behind me.

The good news on that one was that I have rechargeable AA batteries so I could recharge those quickly, but right now, I have two 9-volts out of the five smoke detectors. I think one of them is probably still good, but at this point I don’t care. I’m just so happy to have silence! I had been headed to work that morning but decided to linger, just so I could enjoy the silence.

I don't do windows, but this guy does

Like many offices, ours has a bunch of windows and of course the outside ones have to be cleaned every once in a while. I think ideally, we aim for quarterly, but realistically it’s a bit less. And that’s kind of a relief, because it’s a big ordeal.

How many people does it take to wash windows? Well, I don’t know the total because I was just with one of the two teams. We had one on the ground to do the windows that were accessible by ladders, but I was working with a team of two responsible for the ones that required dangling from a rope over the ledge. One of those guys was the spotter, of sorts, and one guy was the window washer.

Not the guy, but close enough.

In addition, one of my guys was somewhat supervising (he came and went between the two teams) and our regular window washer was also there. He’s one of the guys who does the inside windows regularly and I guess he was there for quality control or something.

And then there was me, so that brought the total of the ropes team to four. I was there because of the location of some of the windows, and I was there from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., so it was a long day standing on the roof watching a guy wash windows.

The actual window washing didn’t take long. I timed one of the latter windows at 27 seconds, but I was there for seven and a half hours.

But that’s not to imply the guys were dilly-dallying. It was a fascinating to watch the window washer in action.

He was like Spiderman, but a Spiderman serious about safety. The guy, who was maybe in his late 20s, had a harness with all these climbing hooks coming off it, each with a specific purpose. He was deliberate about how he hooked up all his wires, hooks and clampy things, taking his time and being very meticulous before lowing himself down the wall.

In all, it probably took an average of 10 minutes to do each window, with less than one minute being the actual sponge-and-squeegee part. He had this awfully long rope, which he doubled up. Watching him roll it up at the end of the day was entertainment in itself  because it reeled  it in, made sure there were no twists in it and looped it around his shoulders for storage, then twisted it into a knot for easy carrying.

He scouted the roof for the little safety hooks, the ones designed exactly for the purpose of allowing people to hang off the walls. I saw this earlier in the summer, too, when the guys power-washed the roof. But Spidey was in a class all his own. Watching him tie knots was mesmerizing, and trying to figure out what all the implements were hanging from his body was a game in itself.

He has a couple of things that looked like compasses in giant Vice-grippy-ish sort  of things, and another thing that I could tell you were supposed hold in your hand, kind of like a squirt gun, but it didn’t have what would have been a muzzle, just so weird tube sort of thing. Turned out, these were pulleys he’d clamp to the rope to help him climb up and down. I don’t mountain climb and really don’t rappel down cliffs, but it seemed like the kind of stuff you’d use for that.

Except that’s fun. (Or at least is to a certain breed of thrill seeker.) This was work, and I cannot fathom how someone would wake up and say to himself, “You know, I want to be a window washer when I grow up. And not just any window washer, a high-rise one.”

Our building isn’t that high, but it’s far up enough and solid enough on the bottom to make it hurt if something went wrong. This guy was no dummy. He was absolutely methodical in his prep work, starting from a long survey of how to rig up his ropes. It wasn’t just a “hook it there and slide down” thing; he used multiple anchors at various parts of the roof. I’m sure it involved math in the same way that playing pool does – tie this here to leverage that, then run this other thing through here.

I don’t know how long it took him to perfect his method, or how he learned. He had an assistant with him who was a bit older so I wondered if he’d apprenticed to a degree, but I couldn’t ask. First of all, the window washer spoke absolutely no English and I can only say good morning, good evening and thank you and count to five in Turkish. Second, the assistant didn’t speak. It took me awhile to catch on to this; I thought the grunting was just to get the window washer’s attention; the anguage of a longtime partnership. But eventually, I realized the older man couldn’t speak, like an Avox in “The Hunger Games.” He communicated by grunting or making a noise with his throat and was pretty good with sign-ish language. When he made some motions in my direction, I had no trouble figuring out that he’d asked if I lived in Istanbul.

Anyway, watching them work together was engrossing. I’d brought along my Florida State beach chair to chillax in, but I never bothered with it. I was utterly fascinated with watching Spidey ease himself over the wall, load up with the bucket, sponge and squeegee and then slowly, a bit at a time, lower himself to the window. Then, if the window was big, he’d keep himself from swinging back and forth by smacking a giant suction cup on the window and holding it while he went to town in the window.

Less than a minute later, he’d do some rearranging of his clamped items – yes, while he just hung there – and the little Vice-grippy pulley would emerge and he’d attach them to the rope. Pulling out what looked kind of like a big nylon dog leash, he stuck one foot in it and then, as he slowly moved the pulleys up the rope, the rope would raise the leash and his foot, mimicking him climbing steps. Once he got to the top but before he pulled himself over, he’d deliberately hand over the sponge/squeegee bucket to the other guy and the do some fancy clamping and unclamping, plus removed this handy nylon sheath that he wrapped around the ropes where they touched the building, which kept them from fraying.

The whole production really was interesting to watch. The guy, young as he was, was a complete pro. Even at the end, he took a couple items the assistant had tucked in there back out so that he could refold them in a certain way.

I really like working with the facilities crew on the weekends, but usually I want to jump in and do some of the work. I like that kind of stuff, though I’ll leave the window washing to Spidey. I really was jealous when they power washed, and when they tore down the wall they pretty much had to hold me back. I like to try to guess how they’re going to go about the work, like which tools they’ll use to do the job.

We had a big part on some kind of air conditioning thing replaced not that long ago, and the unit was on the roof. The part was huge, like lifted-by-crane huge. It was interesting to watch the crew guide the new part in, because it was going a couple floors up on the roof – which has lots of electrical-type stuff on it – and being hoisted by a crane whose driver could not see the roof. There were a couple guys hands-on on the roof, another calling the shots and another relaying the shots over the radio to the crane driver. It went in without a hitch.

Today, I couldn’t even pretend to help, although I think Spidey was amused at my presence. Through one or two other people, I asked a couple questions about the equipment because it baffled me. (I thought the suction cups were kneepads.) But I really couldn’t help, so I took a knee and weeded the roof. And although that must sound a little weird, the roof has these concrete (I guess) square blocks and, either on purpose or not, weeds sometimes spring up between them. Once the team was out of the area where I had to keep a constant eye on them, I sat down and did some weeding.

I miss this kind of stuff, and it makes me want to buy a house.