and of course there are no protected spaces up there in that cage, no covering, and the floor is a mesh too. It would take ages to raise or lower it to the ground and once they've left that position it's difficult to find the right place again and the windowcleaners maximise their time up there as well.
And it's not just coffee. On hot days it could just be bottles of water or pop. maybe a macdonalds visit and a soft drink to cool one down
If its on a long arm that acts as a sizzor with the base that can rotate and the arms can extend as well as raise and lower. That's called a boom lift and is usually electric or diesel powered. The latter ones can go up to several hundred feet but the cage is big enough for 3 or 2 and the gear.
Then there is a sizzor lift, where it just goes up and down straight and to move along you have to do it slowly but you set it parallel to the building and move along slowly.
Hanging lift off the building are larger and slower moving, even more than sizzors but you're more likely to have a boom lift on that job and operated with a foot mounted dead man switch and then joystick controls that work gradually in unison to get a smooth action of movement, with the operator continually looking all around.
Boom and Cage lifts you had to wear safety harnesses with restraining line so you could not move more than 2 meters from the floor mounting point. With care you could get quite far, and the most common we had was after a while people forgetting they were wearing them and jumping out of the cage, sliding out through the exit frame or climbing over the side only to be left dangling, sometimes violently, by the harness. Feet meter inches above the ground and being reminded they did have testicles, once.
I do recall the scream that woke up Stamford in Lincolnshire one sunday morning at 5am that brought the police. When they arrived we had shut down and the sign repairer was whimpering over near their van trying to recover from such an incident. His scream had been reported as someone being attacked... But he was a teenager too, nearly 20s and he had been on the job for a year and this was his first time in a cherry picker.
I spent 5 years on truck mounted versions.
