Window Cleaning Snippets

Broken Window Closes Street. A street closure in downtown Regina (Canada) yesterday is being chalked up to a damaged window. Lorne Street south of 12th Avenue was closed down for several hours Wednesday night after a window-cleaning aparatus cracked one of the SGI buildings large plate glass windows. There was concern a strong wind could blow broken glass into the street below. It was patched overnight and traffic re-opened afterwards.

R.I.P. Dale David Schlosser, 46, Jamestown, died Monday, June 16, 2008, at Jamestown Hospital, Jamestown. He attended school in Edgeley. He married Lisa Graves in 1985. They lived in Jamestown, where he started his own business, City Wide Window Cleaning, which he operated for 23 years. He married Carla Helm in 2006. He enjoyed the outdoors, hunting, fishing, camping, playing frisbee and riding his motorcycle.

Robots at this year’s Hanover Fair. Autonomous robots capable of finding their own way around and performing various tasks were the theme of this year’s Hanover Fair. They ranged from industrial robot fork lift trucks for car factories to robotic jelly fish, programmed to keep clear of each other in water. Applications, or intended applications, were mostly in manufacturing. But there were also robots to inform the public, look for intruders, survey rough terrain, clean windows – and play football. Some worked better than others, but there were none that posed any kind of threat to humans working in the same environment. However, already fully in production and working were the window, solar panel and oil tank cleaning robots developed by Niederberger-Engineering in Oberdorf, Switzerland. Gabriel Strebel states that his company’s machines use GPS navigation and can clean up to 240 square metres per hour, day or night, using suckers to attach themselves to the surfaces they are cleaning. Mostly, the company makes models for cleaning flat areas, but also has models for areas where the panes change angles.

Nick Murante has made a living helping people clean up their acts. Two years ago, Murante had no customers when he created DirtyBlindsNJ.com, a one-stop shop that sells, cleans and repairs window coverings. Today, he said his West Caldwell-based business has more than 300 consumers. " thought it was a great idea to sell window treatments as well as clean them and service them. This was something retailers don't have. Most people wind up replacing their window treatments because they don't know how to properly take care of them.Is there a big demand for your services because of people's more hectic lifestyles?I have noticed that people will invest in good window treatment; it looks good. People are always doing some kind of work in their homes -- changing paint color or maybe getting new furniture. Once that is done, a person will change their window treatments to match their new style."

Cleaner gets MBE. The Commons Speaker Michael Martin's cleaner has been appointed an MBE. I will admit to being a little puzzled by the glowing testimony to Gloria Hawkes, 64, who also cleans the Serjeant-at-Arms department. She is “utterly discreet”, it reads, in a job where the demands are “uncertain and occasionally unpleasant”. It makes a pleasant change from yet another government crony quietly trousering a peerage. Why not give cleaners even more kudos and make them the special advisers to MPs and ministers? The average cleaner is infinitely more in touch with reality than most politicians in the Westminster oxygen bubble could ever be. Some Tories object to a House of Commons cleaner being appointed MBE when there might be other people in the community more deserving.

Brooklyn Restaurant came about from window cleaning: Tio Pio, a popular MetroTech-area eatery in Downtown Brooklyn, has moved and expanded with the help of the MetroTech bid. Owned and operated by three brothers — Carlos, Patricio and Javier Espinosa and long-time friend Luis Valverde, the Bridge Street restaurant re-opened last week at their new location, 78 Willoughby St., between Bridge and Lawrence streets, the former home of a Shaky’s Pizza. Hickey said the brothers’ were virtually raised in their family’s cheese factory in Ecuador and know how to run a successful business. “Javier moved to New York City in 1994 and began working in restaurants around the city until his long time friend Luis convinced him to join him as a window cleaner in 1997. While cleaning windows in Downtown Brooklyn, Javier says he ‘was looking for something to eat and there was nothing I wanted to eat.’ The lack of restaurants prompted him to put together a plan.