A geek’s guide to washing windows

Dorin
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After the amazing success of the shower-battery installation guide, here comes another geek’s guide full of scientific terms like ’thing’ or ‘something’. This time, it’s windows, and they need washing. Let me ellaborate.

Unless you’re in a mental hospital, in your panic room or you’re simply in text mode, you might be familiar with the term ‘window’. It’s a rectangle thing. Usually you can see through it – through it you might access visually the great outsides: your parking lot or the neighboring block-house.

If you can’t identify the window, start by pulling up (or moving sideways) the blinds. Beyond the blinds there is this glass thing, with an alpha factor of around 0.9. This alpha factor (transparency for non-graphically inclined people) varies from 1.0 (Open window) to 0.9 (Closed clean window) down to 0.5 (Very dirty window). You might want to check the value of your alpha factor from time to time; this blocks the external light sources and might save you a few cents on the electricity bill (like, you won’t have to open your lights at 3 in the afternoon).

Unlike common windows, this one doesn’t get ‘clean’ after you close it and re-open it. The operating system that governs them is very primitive, and it needs primitive approaches.

So, you want to increase your alpha factor from 0.5 to around 0.9. Against common wisdom, it’s not so easy to change this parameter of the window, nor does it suffice to change the texture (your room’s window is NOT a texture applied on the wall). You will need specialized detergents, water (the base for all hydration sources), cloth, paper towels. And it’s painful.

But you’re here to find out how it’s done; you’re here for performance tweaks, and tricks. Well, the secret to cleaning around 11 windows in 40 minutes is the following: a T shaped thingie like this one.

So, below the algorithm:

  1. Soak the window in water. Use a sponge. Sometime, your T shaped washer has on ’the other side’ a sponge. Soak it full of water and start wiping the window with it. Your window is now ‘soaked’.
  2. Use now the other part of your T shaped washer. Place near one edge of the window, starting from the top (right)
  3. While keeping the washer very close to the window (by pushing), move it towards the other edge (left)
  4. If you reached the lower edge, go to step 6.
  5. When you reach the edge, decrease height of starting point and go to step 2.
  6. Take one paper towel.
  7. Press it against the top left corner.
  8. Move it towards the lower edge, while keeping it pressed.
  9. Look amazed at how messy it is and throw it while being abhorred by the view.
  10. Admire your work.
  11. Clean up all the water that dripped from the window.
  12. Admire your work.
  13. Move to the next window (step 1).

Good music might come handy to pick up the pace, or slow it down, depending on your mood. My choice for the evening was BB King’s Blues Summit album from 1993.