So I was driving downtown like I always do. I'm stopped at a light and I notice two very young homeless (or bored) looking children going from car to car "cleaning" their windows. Yeah. When they got to me it went something like this:

*Kid approaches*
Me: No no no. Nononon, I'm good, I'm good.
Him: I got you, sir.
Me: Nono, I will pay you, just don't do that.
*Kid ignores my pleas and begins squeegeeing*
Me: Ughhhhhhhhhh.
*Kid leans over the hood, as he is very short and cannot reach the windshield properly. He's wearing a metal belt. I cringe at the fact that he could potentially be scratching the hell out of the paint*

The light goes green and I now cannot see because there is soap all over my windshield. The children run to the side of the road. Great. I sit there, roll up my windows so I don't get soaked, and spray, with plenty of a-holes beeping their horns at me.

Sigh.. I guess I just needed to vent. Anyone else experience this? How do you keep them away?

 

I did... In Mexico City... That's when u step out of the car with an 18inch long 3/4 inch diameter torque wrench. Then they don't touch your car, in fact they quickly move on to another one. So did it do any damage?

Mikey

 

in new york city...we just run them right over.

just kiddin....although im sure it has happened numerous times.
i did have this one guy named "squeegie d". he was awesome. he would clean the windows and sing a song or rap for you. sometimes he would tell jokes. he was always careful of the car and i always looked out for him. then guilliani became mayor and destroyed the city and "d" was gone.

 

See, hell yeah, we have some awesome squeegee guys around here in NY. I had one that would make sure no drops got on your body. would clean the crap outa 2-3 cars before the traffic let up. he was awesome.

also, he had flowers if you wanted. I bet the guy made 500+ a day.

I dont know if that dood sang. HE was happy though and wore a nicer outfit. He had it down to a science. OH! he had someone that had the morning paper as well. NYC rox

wheres my damn mini. someone get it for me.

 

Don't use your torque wrench. . . . you might mess up its calibration

I didn't know such things actually happened outside of movies and TV shows

 

intresting opinion......Everyone outside the city thinks that he cleaned it up and made it worth going to again. I guess you have to drive further for your magizines now?

as far as squeege people.....just turn on your wipers

 

Some of them are nice people... But most of them are acting like jerks.

They have no respect and don't care about anything.

 

Thank God for living in the sorta rural setting. NO SQUEGGEE PEOPLE!!!

 

Carry a can of spray paint to graffitti them!

I remember in NYC about 30 yrs ago (before I moved to Reno), they would just fall on your hood and spray away...Yuk...I suppose you could rig up an open flame device (like a fireplace lighter) on your bonnet and they would go ablaze when the flames touched off their Booze breath! You could always say you were on your way to the Dragon and wanted a firebreather,,,as part of the show!!!


(although today it is probably drugs....answer=Razor wire on bumper!

 

You are definitely justified in being upset. If you have time before the light turns green you could just jump out and try to scare them away. Like this: Otherwise, that's a tough one... I hope I don't run into squeegee people anytime soon...

 

Shoot them

In Florida you can just say your were fearing for your life and the squeegee looked like a weapon, BANG no more squeegee man

 

Baltimore...

I used worked at Bcity for 3 years.. in one case, one of them little squeegee dude came to our office and said that someone at our office stole his bottle of Windex.. He looked pretty damn serious too.

 

use have your wipers and jet wash working and they will move on to the next car. simple... duh...

 

oh, in many ways gulliani did good for the city. he did clean up the city well. he stepped up during 9/11 and really did amazing things. only problem was he removed alot of what made the city great.
as far as tourists are concerned he cleaned up those areas real good and thats cool but, he did nothing for brooklyn, queens, and staten island. or the bronx for that matter. also, he shut down a ton of strip clubs, killed the nightlife for anyone under the age of 25, closed all the major clubs, banned smoking from just about everywhere (which is fine with me but, really it sux). he installed nothing but criminals to run the police department as well as the fire department...bla bla bla. i can go on and on. if you speak to anyone that has grown up in nyc and remember the city before that guy they will tell you the city had so much life in it. it had personality, excitement, danger, fun etc. he really stole the life out of this place. i hope he has a bad case of the green apple splatters right now.

i just miss squeegie d, thats all.

 

Just turn on your wipers....bet you they don't touch the windshield then!

 

We don't have squeege people where I live, but I thought I was going to go off on the drycleaner person yesterday, took my husbands suit to the cleaners, and had it on the hanger, the man working the drive thru part proceeded to just pull the suit through the window not being careful at all about the buttons on the jacket scraping it through the window and then when he was taking the suit off the hanger, he hit my mini , I was like whoo, whoo, he was asking what, I then let him know that he was knocking the hanger against my car, he didn't get it, he just kind of laughed and said oh sorry, I thought I was going to come through the window and choke him.

 

Thanks for the responses.

The only reason I didn't get out of my car or start my wipers, or spray them in the faces with jet wash is because I didn't want to **** them off. I could do something to make them mad, then they'd kick the side of my door in and run away, etc. There'd be nothing I could do about it, as the cops here don't have a very good reputation (my friend was recently carjacked with a cop sitting next to him).

 

Squeegee people are a blight on any city. They need to get themselves real jobs to feed their drug habits.

If you've ever been in a car with young kids and one of these melon-heads leaps onto the hood. It absolutely frightens the little guys to death.

A pox on them all!!!!

 

I confess we have no squeegee people here in D/FW that I know of. I also confess this was my first occasion ever to type the word "squeegee." Not as easy as one might think, yet strangely addictive.

 

Buy yourself one of those airhorns. Roll down window. Depress button into squeegee dude's ear.

Problem solved.

 

The other problem is... when I say young, these kids were around 10-12 years old. VERY young. It added to the shock! What's happening to this city? Well, I guess it's better than it used to be.

 

ha....bingo!!!

 

When I lived in NYC there were loads of them. Fortunately I didn't have a car there, but I'd always cringe every time I saw them pounce on a car. Always the driver would be waving his arms yelling, "no, no, no" and pulling out money but they didn't even care. They just plop a horribly filthy squeegee right on the window and wipe away doing a terrible job. The bucket of water was always black...ugh.

I'd carry a bat in my car and beat anyone that did that!

Or just get 'em with my taser!

 

Or, you could get shot.... Any way you look at it, the squeegee thing is a scam (or extortion...).

 

Rudy was well on his way to being one of the least successful mayors in NYC history before 9/11 - and no matter what you think of his leadership after that time, there were plenty of challenges to it before. My favorite campaign of his was his crusade to have an exhibition at a Brooklyn art museum shut down because he disagreed with the incendiary art being exhibited there. Highly intolerant episode.

His success in reducing crime is wildly overstated. There was a general decline in criminal activity across the nation during the period of his mayorality - due primarily to the thriving economy in the 1990s and the record low rates of unemployment, expecially at lower ends of employment scale. He took unique credit for this but it was a widespread thing. In NYC, his era brought many more complaints of police abuse and mistreatment - and a comensurate decline in the tolerance that the city always prided itself in. Have an open can of beer on a public sidewalk - you were going to jail (I have friends who faced that).

Unfortunately his legacy is having beaten out of New York so much of what made the city a special place. I work in Times Square - and it used to be wonderfully edgy where there was just enough danger to be exciting and enough illicit opportunities to titilate visitors - even if you never went to the adult entertainment. Now, it is wall-to-wall Disney, McDonalds, shoe stores and Red Lobsters. In effect, it has become a mirror of suburban America and no longer a one-of-a-kind place.

The squeegee guys were a pain but were part of the mosaic of the city that gave you wonderful cocktail hour talk. I miss them.

Bill