'Not wearing a lot': the surprises that sometimes greet Canberra's window cleaners

"We've had some young office girls hand out their phone numbers," James Howe, owner of Rope Access Engineering said. It's based in Fyshwick and cleans apartment and office blocks in the ACT and beyond.

And cleaners who do apartment blocks get a surprise: "People coming out the shower not wearing a lot, or two people having a bit of fun with each other."

But he said that such pleasures were rare for window cleaners: "There's usually a bit of warning."

Office cleaners don't get those pleasures because (one would like to assume) people at work are more discreet.

All the same, for Luke Stringer, Dymock Dibb, Codie Kennedy and Laurie Kefford bouncing down the glass of a big commercial block a hundred metres above the hard Canberra pavements is a dream.

"Fun" is the word they use about the job - better than IT where Luke used to work. "So cool," 25-year-old Codie said.

From childhood, it was her destiny: "My parents and my sister used to call me 'monkey girl'. I just would be climbing anything so when I found out about the job, I was like, 'That's so cool. That's what I wanna do'.

"I used to work in childcare, and I just wanted to be outside and use my hands." And then her sister said "what about those people that come and clean my building?"

She hasn't looked back - or down, very much.

She said she was anxious about heights but not actually frightened because the cleaners are strapped into harnesses. Buckets of water and cloths are all strapped to them. "In this job, you have to have so much trust in your gear that it almost deletes the fear of heights because you know logically nothing can happen."

Her big regret is that Canberra doesn't have sky-scrapers. She dreams of the world's tallest building in Dubai, "If I could scale the (829.8 metre) Burj Khalifa or a skyscraper, that would be my dream.

"I think it'd be so cool to just be hanging so far up that the ground below you is just so tiny."

The market for high-rise window cleaners has boomed recently as construction of office and apartment blocks has boomed. Jobs are advertised but workers need an industrial abseiling ticket which involves a course and just short of $2000.

Laurie Kefford started on wind turbines three years ago. When he started, vertigo gripped him. "I was scared, as everyone is but now it's just like riding a bike. You're just used to it.

But the real risk is small whatever his gut and the hairs on his legs are telling him.

"The most dangerous part of my job is probably driving to work, especially with Canberra drivers," he said.

Weirdly, he said he got more fear of heights from looking up rather than looking down.

"Looking up is so much worse," he said at the base of one of the tall office buildings on Marcus Clarke Street. "If I'm here and look up now, that's like, 'Oh my god, oh my god'."

Dymock Dibb also loves the job. He was an engineering working on chimneys and bridges, and realised the bit of it he liked was the outdoor work.

"I just loved being out the ropes, working with my hands, and working in an office and managing people got stressful. I'm much happier doing this now," he said.

"I've had my ropes ticket since 2018 but I've only been doing windows for the past week."

For him, it's a busman's holiday because he is also a rock climber. Even so, he said he'd had to overcome vertigo. "It's definitely the first few times you do it, and you're going over the edge," he said.

"The thing that I worry about more than myself falling, is dropping things. I know all my equipment is tied together completely safely and I'm going to be safe, but you have to go through your checklist asking 'Have I clipped that in properly? Have I closed that pouch'?

"Because if you haven't done one of those things, you could drop your phone off a 20-storey building and kill someone."

Luke Stringer's vertigo has softened.

"I'm very comfortable going down now. When I first started, I wasn't. It was hard to think about going over the edge."

They mostly do office blocks so they don't get the chance to see into people's bedrooms with all that that accidental intrusion might offer. All the same, there's interaction with office workers.

"There's definitely that awkward moment where people realise you, like, realise you're there.

"On my very first job it was actually kind of fun. When I got down to the last window of the drop, the lady in the window was working. She saw me, waved as I started and then she gave me a thumbs up as I finished."