A Bus Blawg rebuttal

As I assumed it would, my most previous blawg prompted a response from my awesome daddy. For those of you who would like further explanation into my "steel thingy" please see below:

Ah my young one,Allow me to provide an education in this regard.

The steel thingie is called a "pick board" in laymens terms. It is actually made of aluminum framing with an air drive or electric drive motor on each end.  It is from 20' to 30' wide, depending on how many of the thingie things they bolt togeather to make the final length.This said steelie thingie hangs from two (2) steel 1/4" diameter wire cables.  Each cable feeds into one of the motors at the end of the pick board.  You push the handle to the right to go up, and to the left to go down.  When the cable gets stuck in the motor, you then need to work the "sky brake" to release the clamp mechanism that is locked onto the steel cable.  It did this to keep the cable from free wheeling out of the moror spool.  That is bad, as the steelie thingie would then fall very very fast to the ground.Since these steelie thingies hang from thin steel cables, they do tend to swing very easily.

 Winds at that height can get up to 30-40 MPH easy.  That will tend to swing the thingie alot.  Hence, it will bang into the building.  It should not hurt the thingie.The guys on the thingie would be wearing a body harness and a lanyard.  A lanyard is 4' long piece of folder up flat material that connects your  harness to something else.  This would be a "rope grab", which connects you to your safety line.  The rope grab kinda squeezes around the safety line.  You slide the rope grab up and down the safety rope as you drive the pick board up and down the building.  

Technically, the rope grab is designed to "grab" onto the safety rope if you fall out of the thingie or the 1/4" steel cables break.  If either case occures, the lanyard and harness will stop your fall and you will hang there on the safety cable.  Most people, at that point, will be very uncomfortable due to the hanging experience and the huge brown skids in their shorts that they now have.I can most definately assure you that the safety ropes were not being held by the morons on the roof.  The ropes were tied off to some beefy structural steel or to a device that could lower these guys to the ground if the thingie fell.

 The safety lines this long would weigh about 300 pounds each.  Besides, You learn preety quick to go check your rigging before going up on the thingie.  It keep the shorts clean.How do I know all this, you ask?I have personally been up on thingies exactly list this probably over 1000 times in my 30 years doing boilers.  I have been as high as 230 feet, or about a 25 story building.  The most unconfortable times are not when you are next to a wall or other surface - it's being up about 200' with nothing around you for 30' to 40'.  A man finds religion pretty quickly when this is the case and the climber motor starts making very bad sounding noises.
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And that, my peeps, is why my dad is cooler than yours :)