I'm Glad it Wasn't Me

So, today I almost witnessed a man plummet to his death.  

It was not exciting.  It was actually kind of horrifying.  (OK, maybe a little exciting as well.)

There I was, minding my own business.  I was inside Grand Street Coffee, doing what baristas do.  (Which, in my case, is normally cleaning.)  We had a couple of guys in installing our cable and it was only myself and my boss Scott in the store.  We noticed that the cable guys had given up attempting to hook up our cable and instead were standing outside, gawking at something, and talking on their phones.

Scott went out to see what was going on.  I was curious, but continued about my day.

Next, I heard the sirens.  And then more sirens.  And then some more sirens.  I wandered outside and saw 3 fire trucks blocking off the street in front of the building 2 down from us.  I started looking around for the fire.  I could hear more sirens in the distance.  

Finally, I glanced up and quickly realized what the problem was.  There was some of that painter's scaffolding hanging off the roof of the 10 story building.  It had obviously encountered some issues, as it was hanging by only one side.  There was a bucket of paint splattered on the ground below it and a man hanging on strapped to the scaffolding.

By the time I got outside, one of the workers had broken a window and made it inside, but the other man couldn't make his way down and was just waiting there.  It seemed like he was OK, and the fire truck with the big ladder was pulling up which made me feel good.

But this is when things got dicey.  Rather than waiting for the firemen to make their way to the roof, the man's friend decided to attempt to Cliffhanger pull the dude up to the roof off the scaffolding.  They locked hands, the man on the roof started to pull, and the dude on the scaffolding simply started to dangle even more precariously 1o stories up.  

The firefighters started yelling from the ground and moving the ladder as fast as they could.  You could tell they were worried and that's when I got worried too.  At that point, I had to go inside because, morbid curiosity or not, I did not want to witness this man falling to his death.  That doesn't seem like something I need to see.

After a few minutes, I made my way back out.  I hadn't heard any yelling and I wanted to make sure the man was OK.  He had somehow gotten back onto the not sturdy scaffolding which seemed much wiser to me.  Turns out the fire ladder did not reach all the way up to the guy, so he had to wait for the firemen to get to the roof and go through the whole process of rescuing him.

They ended up lowering a firefighter down to rescue harness him and then pulled them both up.  The process of pulling them up gave me quite a fright again even though I was certain the firefighters had harnessed him in well.  There was just this moment where his feet were dangling that had me near tears.  

But they made the rescue and all was good.  Oh, and there ended up being like 9 fire trucks and 2 news helicopters to add to the excitement.  I felt like I was in a movie.

Too much excitement for me.

Check out the story in the star here.