"There was no ledge!" and other sad tales

It's been a long and trying day and I am grumpy as hell, but I'm sure nothing compares to the kind of day all the office building window-washers must be having. Of late it seems as though no office building in Singapore would be complete without some man in overalls dangling from a rope with a soapy window-sponge.

Usually I'd give all this a miss by simply closing the blinds but in my current office, we have a balcony which every window-washer for this building seems to be using as a launch pad. They walk through our office, trudge out into the balcony, stand on (I said on, not near or against or away from, but ON) the balcony railing, light their little cigarettes, chat a little and then they start to tie a rope around their otherwise completely unsecured bodies and jump off.

A colleague had minor heart palpitations when he saw. There's a ledge, I told him blithely. It's just a metre or so down. They might be bruised, but that's it. He was not in agreement. This evening, we walked out to the balcony and looked over the railing.

I guess it's a good thing that I didn't know.