Swapping Programming for Window Cleaning

Steep thrills for the benefit of Mr Keyte: Daniel Keyte has been working 220 metres above the Sydney city centre without a safety net. All that is between him and oblivion is rope and hope. He has just spent four days dangling off lines more than 52 storeys above busy George Street while he scraped away corrosion and slapped paint on the 40-metre steel pole atop the Ernst & Young building.
Mr Keyte, a former Canberra IT programmer, used to watch window cleaners outside his high-rise office and realised they were their own men, free as birds. It looked more pleasant than being cooped up with computers. Once he would have been called a steeplejack but Mr Keyte, 27, describes himself as an industrial abseiler, a workplace application of the rock climbing he took up as a teenage hobby to overcome acrophobia.
"That's all behind me now. The only way you beat your fear is to face it and the Ernst & Young was our tallest assignment so far," Mr Keyte said. "To be honest, it wasn't a big problem. The weather was nice, sunny, little wind - besides, I've climbed higher stuff."
His day job has funded climbing expeditions to many rocky hard places, including the Blue Mountains, Victoria's Mount Arapiles and peaks in New Zealand, Thailand and Europe. The rising number of tall buildings has enabled his Canberra company, Rope Access Engineering, to expand to 10 climbers in just a couple of years.
They are different from window cleaners, who work from the relative safety of platforms slung down the sides of buildings. "We'll do any job that can only be reached by rope," Mr Keyte said.
He has been dropped into air-conditioning ducts, swung around radio dishes at NASA's Deep Space Network complex at Tidbinbilla and dangled off tall buildings. "Much of the work involves finishing off little jobs that have been left behind when the builders quit and nobody can get at the work because it's too high or too far down," Mr Keyte said.
He nearly completed a human biology degree at the University of Canberra, but quit to work in the public service with computers - not exactly a great apprenticeship for being a tradie in the sky. "I grew up on a diary farm and a lot of the jobs I did at uni were practical ones that required using your hands, so I can get by," he said. "Of course, we can't do stuff that requires certified tradesmen, so we work with guys to get them into place to do the work." Mr Keyte said there were no uniform national laws concerning work safety in high places.