I enjoy living in a truck. It's simple and efficient, it's a choice I made and intend to stand by. I wouldn't necessarily say I'm proud of living a truck, but I certainly don't have a problem telling people about it (as evident by the fact that this blog exists). When I meet new people, it normally comes up as a matter of course, and I'm more than happy to talk about it and all the quirky things that come with it. That said, this installment of Tips from the Truck is concerned with knowing when truck talk is not appropriate, namely in the workplace.

Very few (read: two) of my coworkers know that I live in a truck. For the most part, if housing comes up in discussion, as far as they're concerned I live in a small apartment in a nondescript part of the Bay Area. I don't encourage lying to your coworkers as part of a healthy daily regimen of deceit, but my argument here is this: These people are colleagues and coworkers first and foremost, I'm interacting with them on a daily basis exchanging ideas and sending code back and forth. For that to work smoothly and efficiently, my workplace peers need to see me as a competent, contributing member of the team who they feel comfortable collaborating with. Being the dude who lives out back like some sort of trailer park reject MacGyver-ing the workplace to suit his needs is not a great way to foster teamwork and cooperation. I'm sure they'd be more than accepting of the situation if I explained it to them; the vast majority of people I talk to about it are very receptive and understanding, but I'd hate for a personal detail to poison any coworker relationships in the event someone didn't approve. So, now that we know there's a ruse to uphold, how do we keep with it, without expending too much effort?

I've said in the past that if you're going to live in a truck, hygiene needs to be a top priority. Seriously. This means having floss, deodorant, toothpaste, a razor, and Q-tips^® in your gym bag on a daily basis, and using them. No skimping: gym, shower, shave, and get ready for the day, everyday, without fail. You need to go into work looking clean and well-composed, not aloof and sloppy (this is just generally good advice). This also means doing laundry as frequently as necessary to make sure you're never wearing dirty clothes (again, generally reasonable). Being in Silicon Valley and an engineer means you probably don't have a dress code at work (unless you're at HP), but you should still try to wear a collared shirt every now and then.

This poses another problem though, because what's the point of wearing a collared shirt if it's going to be wrinkled and unsightly. After all, you live in a truck and I hope you don't have an iron in there, that seems like a bad idea. But you still want to have fresh, wrinkle-free clothes, right? My strategy for this has been to use fabric softener and "wrinkle-free" dry cycles, and then watch the dryer like a paranoid hawk, grabbing and folding the clothes before they cool down all wrinkled and unpleasant-looking. Once you get back to your truck, hang up all your dress shirts if you have the room.*

One final tip: seeing as you don't have running water, it can be tricky to clean things like shoes and water bottles. For my shoes, I like to take a damp, post-shower towel and run it around the outsole a few times a week to keep them fresh-looking, and I wash out my water bottle in the office kitchen.

Easy peasy, lemon squeezy! You're a prim and proper pickup truck plutocrat. Now go out into the real world smelling fresh and looking way less crazy than you actually are.

Every once in a while, life will challenge you with a question. Not only does this question require an answer, but regardless of the choice you make, you know that it will have a profound impact on your life. Thankfully, it is infrequently that we are burdened with such decisions, but we must still be vigilant so that we may ponder and puzzle and appropriately pick a plan when the need arises. Recently, one of these decisions was thrust upon my shoulders, and it came to me in the following form:

Hey Brandon, would you like a couch? A friend of mine has a new one they don't need anymore.

Ok, maybe I was being a bit dramatic initially, but I've learned that living in a truck changes where your priorities lie. For example, if I lived in an apartment, chances are I would have simply said yes. A free, new piece of furniture for my (likely) sparingly furnished (imaginary) apartment would be a nice addition. It's especially hard to argue with the free part. However, I don't live in an apartment, so there were some considerations to be had. So, as I am one to do in the face of adversity, I made a list of pros and cons.

Pros

I'd been considering getting a couch even before one was offered to me on a silver platter. These are the reasons why I was even thinking about it in the first place.

• Sprucing up the place. As evident from this post, I still have a ton of free space, my truck is a pretty spartan affair. Adding a new piece of furniture could add some Feng Shui to the whole situation.
• Chill space. I'm not in the truck frequently, and I especially don't have people over frequently. That said, it does sometimes happen, and I'd like it to be a pleasant experience when it does. A couch would make it easier for a couple friends to come over and hang out. Or I could always come to them with my chill pad, that's a weird perk.
• It's just more homey. This is in line with the above points. People are always telling me that the truck doesn't look particularly welcoming. Naturally, that's not the goal, the goal is to have a comfortable place to sleep. Adding in a couch would definitely help to diffuse the "unwelcoming vibes".
• Free! It doesn't cost anything! You really can't beat just being handed a free, new couch.

Cons

Sounds pretty good, right? What sort of drawbacks could there possibly be? As it turns out, putting the couch in a truck changes the equation a little bit.

• Free? In a house, the couch would be free. In a truck, I pay for the cost of the couch in reduced gas mileage. As it turns out, I have to drive everything I own around every time I pull out of a parking spot. I don't drive around all that much, as I've undoubtedly mentioned before, but I'm still toting around my bed and bureau every time I do, which is less efficient than if I didn't own those things. How much less efficient, you ask? Well, looking at this comic, which references this conversation, which (finally) links to this tool, it looks like a car takes about a 0.5% hit to fuel economy for every 50 pounds added to it. Time to make some assumptions. Let's assume that I get 10 miles per gallon, gas costs $3.50, and the sofa bed weighs 150 pounds (thanks Ikea). Since we're adding 50 pounds three times over (150/50 = 3), that means we're taking the 0.5% hit three times, which means we're operating at ~98.5% efficiency (100*0.995³). So if I were to drive 1,000 miles, without the couch I'd use 100 gallons of gas. With the couch, I'd use 101.5 gallons. Wait a second, that's not even that much worse, that's like $5 extra for every 1,000 miles I drive. I expected it to actually be a lot, my bad.
• Empty space, for now. I mentioned above that I have tons of free space, and that's entirely true. However, I don't know how my needs are going to change in the future, and adding a couch does take away like ~15% of the free space that I do have. It's good to keep the extra space, if for no other reason than to be flexible.
• Bug food. I'll eventually dedicate a whole post to this, but in essence: there are enough diverse species of bugs around that there is at least one genetically-engineered to be an eating machine for each and every material in existence. This especially includes cloth, which there will undoubtedly be a ton of in a couch. The last thing I want is a micro-ecosystem thriving in the depths of my couch.

With the sudden realization that owning the couch costs me like $5 every 1,000 miles, I'm almost regretting not getting it, because that was my biggest concern. Oh well, you live and you learn.

Gnat nightmares, spider sadness, moth madness, ant anxiety, bug barrage—ok I'll stop now.

I'm not a fan of bugs. Generally speaking, unless you're an entomologist or earthy-crunchy type, you probably aren't either. I'm not terrified of them by any means, I'm not liable to stop what I'm doing if a bug decides to drop by and say hey, but I'm still likely to exterminate them all with extreme prejudice before going to sleep. After all, nobody is trying to eat spiders whilst slumbering. I'm happy to say that I haven't had any full-blown infestations recently, though it hasn't always been the case.

Before I recount in gritty detail the various hordes who've ravaged my home, I should note that the box makes a fantastic breeding ground for all of my nightmares. It's warm, dark, and humid during the day, and I keep the back gate slightly open at night for air circulation and temperature control, so it's even easily accessible for them. On top of that, despite not keeping any food in there, there are more than enough yummy goodies (from an insect's perspective) in the form of cloth, wood, and the various clumps of refuse hiding in cracks and crevices left behind by previous truckers. Basically, I'd been inadvertently building a 128 ft² insect farm and microbiome from the start.

Moths

Moths were the first plague I encountered. I'm not sure what drew them in initially, but I started noticing them a few days after I "moved in". As it turns out, moths feed on fabric, particularly wool and silk, which I apparently have in my wardrobe (who would have thought). For about a week, it was a pretty common occurrence to have 3 or 4 flying around when I came back, and it really bothered me when they'd fly out of my gym bag at work, or I'd find them dead at the bottom of the dryer (I'm currently shuddering thinking about the latter two). I think the issue is mainly that my clothes (on a rack) are too easily accessible, clothes left in the attic of a normal home have similar issues. Anyway, I went on a pretty intense extermination spree, shaking out all my clothes and washing my entire wardrobe, and that seemed to do the trick. Now I periodically beat all my clothes with a broomstick, like a normal, well-adjusted human being. And when I'm packing the next-day's clothes into my gym bag, I always shake them out first to double check. I still have the odd run-in with moths, but now it's more like one per week, which is, in my opinion, very manageable.

Spiders

If you had never seen a spider before, and nobody had explained to you that spiders existed, it'd be very reasonable to believe that they were straight up malicious alien lifeforms. They're hairy, have legs coming out radially all over the place, have crazy eyes, and they make these intricate webs exclusively for trapping (and subsequently eating alive) prey and pissing people off. They're weird and scary, and in the harsh lighting of my truck, they cast massive, nightmarish shadows, regardless of their actual size. On top of that, their presence normally means there are other pests for them to feed on, so their very existence spells trouble. For all these reasons, I have quite the preoccupation with keeping them away from me. I've never found more than one or two at a time, but I'm much more comfortable when there are zero of them. Controlling them normally means controlling whatever else has inhabited the box first, then killing all the leftover spiders by hunting them down one by one. Finding all their sneaky hiding spots can be tricky, but it's not that bad when your entire house is one room.

Ants

My ant infestation was by far the worst experience I had. Originally, I noticed a few small, translucent insects crawling over the wood securement I use to hold the bed in place. No big deal I thought, I'll just move the wood to near the door and brush them off outside with the broom. But when I moved the wood, I saw that there were a ton more of them, and it wasn't the wood that they were after. In fact, hordes of them were moving back and forth from a shadowed corner of the truck. This is essentially what nightmares are made of, an uncountable number of entities moving in the shadows. I immediately moved my bed to the other side of the truck, and hesitantly shined a flashlight into the shadowy corner. It was as awful as I could have imagined. I was greeted by an army of tiny, determined ants, pouring endlessly out of a small crack in the wall. I spent the next two hours sweeping them out of the truck, neurotically checking and scrubbing every corner of the truck. Once I felt I had it under control, I went to sleep, only to be haunted by wave after wave of insect-related nightmares. As you can imagine, the next day saw a hasty trip to none other than Home Depot.

The tricky thing about killing insects in the truck is that you can't outright spray them with chemicals or put mothballs everywhere: it's a small, enclosed, poorly-ventilated area, and spraying a pesticide cocktail in the place where I sleep is pretty much a guarantee that my kids will be born with the wrong number of eyes and limbs. Luckily, I found these perfectly-evil ant traps, which work by being delicious to ants, and then killing them after they've already fed the entire colony. I dropped one of those bad boys near the aforementioned crack of despair, and then didn't look at it for two days. When I went to check in, the transparent plastic container was filled with the stationary bodies of my enemies, which brought me a palpable sense of relief (and joy?). I threw that trap out, and put another one down. At present, that second trap has been down for three weeks, and I haven't seen a single ant in or around the truck since. Powerful stuff.

One problem that you wouldn't expect to have in a truck is losing things. It's a single, small, essentially square room. There are no doors, closets, nooks, crannies, trap doors, false floors, drop ceilings, or hiding places to speak of. Everything should be well accounted for. In spite of this, I've managed to lose the following items, most of which I acquired on my first trip to Home Depot.

• Switchblade
• Screwdriver
• Roll of Tape
• Nail Clippers
• Batteries

I've spent an obscene amount of time racking my brain over where these things could have possibly gone, checking every crevice and corner and drawer (all four of them). Nothing within the realm of logic and reason can produce an explanation as to what has happened to my various belongs. It's not like they all vanished at once either. They're being picked off one by one, like they're all characters in a horror movie, being tormented by a killer of inanimate objects. Naturally I don't notice their absence until I need them, the perfectly inopportune time.

In all likelihood, I'm just misplacing them or throwing them away by accident or eating them in my sleep, but I'm much more fond of the idea that someone is playing an incredibly elaborate prank on me. It's not like anything missing is particularly expensive (not that I have anything of value in there), so it's not particularly worrisome to me. What will disappear next? Will I ever solve the puzzle? Is my truck eating my other belongings out of jealous? The world may never know.

...or at least drive Class B vehicles. Also, as it turns out, licenses have a lot of personal information on them, and I've done my darnedest to remove any fun details, like where I "live".

Anyways, I've finally done it. For those who don't understand why this is exciting for me, let me give you a bit of background.

The Backstory

I drove buses in college. It was the highest-paying job on campus, which is what initially drew me towards it. But it was the flexibility, fun coworkers, and quick promotion to programmer that kept me there. The deal was that they'd pay you while training you to get your CDL license, and in return you'd drive for them for a few semesters at the very least, which as I mentioned in this post, is a pretty sweet deal. So I did my shtick driving buses and writing code for them for four years while I pursued higher education. Overall it was a good time, I definitely recommend it.

Onwards, to Cali

So I graduated and decided to try out this coast out for a while. One of the first things I did (after buying the box truck, of course) was make my way down to the DMV and get a license like a real-life California resident. I would have been fine with a normal, Class C license. After all, my career out here is software engineering, not bus driving. But a consequence of getting a normal license, because of various laws and whatnot, was that the DMV would have to shred and invalidate my out-of-state Class B license. This, I was not fine with. I felt that I had worked hard and earned the right to drive stupidly large vehicles, why should moving across the country deprive me of that? So I started looking into the process to transfer my CDL license to a California CDL license.

The Process

After a bit of inquiry, I found out that the process would be approximately two steps. The first: pass a series of tests on how to not crash large, occasionally fast-moving vehicles. The second: prove to a certified doctor that you probably won't fall asleep/die/seize/go blind/spontaneously combust while piloting aforementioned vehicles. Easy peasy. I aced the tests on my first second try. I found a local person who claimed to be a doctor and allowed them to examine me. They seemed confident I was fit to commandeer 13+ ton pieces of machinery, and if they're cool with it, I'm cool with it.

Roadblocks

With all of my completed paperwork in hand, I drudged my way back to the DMV and patiently waited in line for the better part of eternity. Once it was my turn, I approached the pearly gates and handed them my papers, and they spoke thusly:

Sorry, there's been a computer error, you'll have to come back next week.

-DMV Employee/Keeper of the Pearly Gates

This was devastating to me for a few reasons. Firstly, this process had really been dragging on, it had been almost three months since my first DMV visit (with four more in the middle), and I was really hoping this would be the last one. The second, and most nerve-racking reason, was that I didn't know what was causing the computer error. What made my application different than all of the others? Was it because I didn't have a real address? Was the DMV about to accidentally stumble onto the fact that I'm secretly homeless and the home address I've provided them with is nothing more than a storefront. After all, it doesn't take more than a Google search of the address to see that it's a glorified post office box, could they have a system that does the same thing? This was moderately stressful, I was sure that I was all set and then this roadblock popped up. A soul-crushing experience all-around.

The Return Trip

So I made another trip to the DMV a few days later. If you're a fan of the sound of small children crying, or particularly enjoy the scents of bad hygiene and hyperhidrosis, then you would have had a blast at this DMV outing. I, like most people, am not a fan of those things, and thus I did not enjoy this DMV trip. In any case, I went back up, explained my story, and they called some people who hopefully had a better grasp on the situation. After a few more eternities, they asked for my old license, and in return handed me a small piece of paper with the title "TEMPORARY LICENSE".

This was a start, but I was still on edge, and wouldn't be entirely comfortable until I had the full-blown, big boy license, which they said should arrive in the mail in the next 60 days. In my haste and anxiousness, I didn't realize the implications of handing in my only photo ID. What this meant was that the ensuing few weeks were to be devoid of any bar-visits on my behalf, tragic I know. But as is evident from the picture above, it did eventually arrive in the mail, adding legitimacy to both my truck ownership, and my sketchy private mail box address. If there's any takeaway from this story, it's that the DMV can be a fickle mistress, but things normally work themselves out in the end.

A terrible takeaway I know, but unfortunately my hours of pondering life's unanswered questions while waiting at the DMV didn't yield any earth-shattering revelations.