here comes a man through the window pane
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
This morning as with most Mondays I got an early start at work at around 07:00. Around 08:45 I heard one of the painters walking about on the roof. Then I heard the unmistakable sounds of someone falling and sliding down the roof. I turned in shock and watched the fellow have what had to have been the luckiest fall of his life. Instead of sailing six meters to the ground and possibly landing badly on a fence or one the neighbor's air conditioning units*, he hit one of the uprights on the scaffolding they were using. He bounced off this and slammed into the deck of the scaffolding. But with his leg through the small window that's above our bed. There was, of course, broken glass everywhere and he was bleeding from his head, arm, and leg. He hadn't been wearing any kind of harness or even a helmet or for that matter decent gloves or boots. I can understand how gloves might impede a painter but it's too much.
Then came the aftermath. I started speaking to him in my broken Japanese and suggested that he could easily have "head problems" and that he should stop working and get to a hospital. This took quite a bit of doing, but Mari soon joined the conversation and we saw him off. I hadn't realized he was working alone today to top it off but I guess he drove himself to a clinic and came back with the news that he had to go to the hospital. By this time Mari was engaged in a meeting (I'd told my colleagues that I was shaking broken glass out of the ear plugs and mouth guard and eye mask etc and would miss a couple of calls) so I had to listen to his story when he came back that he'd work until he could be relieved by a colleague. I'm fairly used to dealing with urgent incidents, having worked in IT for more than 25 years and having been an incident manager for two of the most hellish of those. So I explained to him that he was more important than the house and that we could wait and instructed him that (formally and politely) to get to a hospital and not wait. He did so, and I got back to my dozen-meeting day.
By the end of the day we already had a new window, and the owners of the painting company had come by to have a look at the site and make some exasperated comments and then for some reason apologize to us and give us an expensive box of cookies. Which we later shared with the painter who turned out to be the brother of the fellow who'd nearly dies had the big fall.
*In Toronto I once had a conversation with a fellow in crutches on the street car. It was clear that the lower half of his body just didn't work. He told me that he'd been a roofer and that one of his staff had failed to secure his harness and when he slipped he'd fallen off the building and landed so that his back was cracked by an air conditioner output fan.