I knew the day would come eventually. In one of my first posts, I mentioned a guy who was doing something similar to what I'm doing now. His observation was that security personnel at these large companies doesn't care how insane you are if you work at the company and aren't hurting anyone. Last night, I had my first run in with company security. What follows is my experience.

It's almost 1 am, I just got out of a movie with a few friends. The movie was mediocre at best, certainly nothing special. I drive my house back to my usual parking place at the edge of a company lot, as I normally do. I grab my bag of toiletries and head into a nearby building to brush my teeth and wash my face. As I walk out, I pass a security car. They linger for a minute, and then drive off. I don't think much of it. After a short traipse across the lot, I hop into my car, put on my pajamas, and go to sleep.

Knock. Knock. Knock. Is there anyone in there?

It's 2 am, and I'm pretty disoriented. I try to compose myself and quietly reply, "Yes, one second." After stumbling around in the dark for a few seconds, I find a sweatshirt and throw it on. Opening up the back gate and going outside, I'm greeted by approximately 10 security personnel, pointing flashlights in various directions, standing by a variety of security vehicles. They explain to me that one of them saw me get into the back of the car, and when they ran my plate against the company database, the information didn't match up. Apparently I'd registered the car as a Chevrolet Econoline in the company's internal system, when in reality it was a Ford.* I offer to move my truck, but they tell me I'm fine, and even that I have a "sweet setup". I hand one of them my corporate badge and make weird truck-related small talk with the rest as they confirm with the security dispatcher that I am indeed an employee. It felt like an eternity, but the whole interaction took place over the course of less than 5 minutes. They tell me to have a nice night, and even apologize for waking me up.

After explaining the situation to a friend they were "glad the interaction with security has happened, went well and [is] over," a sentiment I share. Like I said, it was inevitable, and I'm actually pretty surprised that it took three months to happen. But now that I know for sure I'm not being banished or shunned at a corporate level for my truck lifestyle, I can rest that much easier.

*_{I checked after and they were totally right, my bad. "Chevrolet Econoline" isn't even a real vehicle.}

_{Note: I wrote most of this post immediately after it happened. Like, literally as the cars were driving away at 2 am.}

Human beings didn't become the dominant lifeforms on the planet by being rigid and inflexible in the face of change. We're able to adapt, when we receive similar stimuli over and over again, we react to it more and more efficiently and effectively each time. Naturally, these stimuli come in an endless procession, in innumerable forms. On a physical, nearly tangible level, repeated stresses on our bodies build muscle mass so that we're better equipped to handle these stresses in the future. Biologically, our bodies learn to handle repeated threats by developing antigens after the first encounter. Socially, we modify our habits to fit in with our habitats. When we uproot our lives and move to other locations we learn local customs over time, and our interactions with our environment become more fluid over time. My situation is no different, and I'm definitely noticing the ways I've adjusted, both consciously and unconsciously, to my environment.

I noticed it earlier tonight, while I was getting ready for bed. I threw open the back gate of the truck, a now-familiar cacophony that I've come to associate with home. I tossed my gym bag in first with a loud thud and some clanging, and then I hopped in. As has become ritual, I started flipping through the music catalog on my phone looking for an accompaniment to my routine. Once I found something good, I plopped the phone onto my bed and started unpacking and re-packing my bag. I pulled off all my work clothes, dumped them into my laundry bag, and put on some pajamas. I'm presently laying in bed, listening to the playlist I picked out, and writing this post.

Now contrast that with my first night. It's only been three months, but it turns out acclimating to a new routine happens pretty quickly. The body craves consistency, and is definitely much more comfortable when it doesn't have to work too hard to maintain homeostasis. On my first night, I was a nervous wreck. The whole evening leading up to it was torturous. I was still grappling with the idea of not having a fixed home, full of concerns about my relatively unknown environment, and futilely trying to process the constant information overload. When I was within sight of the truck, I became paranoid and uncomfortable, my eyes darting around like everyone was onto me. I scurried across the lot with my heart racing at a hundred miles a minute, and I didn't even start unlocking the back gate until I had convinced myself I was the only person in a 10 mile radius. Similarly, opening the back gate happened at a slower pace than tectonic plate movement, and I winced at each and every loud, unavoidable creak. Once inside, I crept around like a field mouse, and listened intently to the silence of the surrounding area for minutes before I even considered getting undressed. My whole routine for getting ready was awkward and inefficient, tip-toeing back and forth, treating the squeaky floorboards like landmines. It took more than twice as long as it does now, and was just all around not well-tuned for the situation.

But that's the power of adaptation. It doesn't even require a concerted effort on the part of the adapter, sometimes the driving force is just a subconscious desire for a better plan of action. It's a powerful tool against all shades of strife and adversity, a weapon so graciously bestowed upon humankind by a few billion years of fighting against our environments. It's certainly a reassuring thought, at least for me, that time is all it takes.

_{First of all, apologies for the lack of updates over the past few weeks, I've been busy with a product launch and doing a bit of work-related travel, so I haven't had a chance to sit down and polish off any of posts. However, things are starting to settle down, and I have a bunch of new posts in the pipeline at various levels of readiness, so watch for those over the coming week.}

I did a bit of traveling back east last week, first to give a tech talk at my alma mater, and then to work out of the Boston branch of my company. Aside from the general allure of travel and visiting other offices, there was also something particularly interesting about this trip for me: I got to experience a work routine much closer to what everyone else in the working world experiences. For the first day of my trip, I stayed in a hotel near UMass, but opted to stay at a (hospitable) friend's house on the South Shore while working in Boston. No trucks, no showering at a gym, just a normal house and a normal commute to work.

The Commute

I've definitely mentioned my distain for traffic before; nothing rubs me quite as wrong as a couple thousand cars idling unnecessarily and wasting time that could otherwise be spend on less menial, mindless, monotonous tasks. Truck life allows me to avoid this for the most part, I live walking distance from work, and my normal "commute" doesn't even touch real roads, it's an assortment of trails and pedestrian areas.

The First Day

Leaving UMass for Boston at 10 am on a Wednesday morning was a great call. I had a zippy (but otherwise unnoteworthy) trip down the Mass Pike, steering wheel in one hand and some sorely missed Dunkin' Donuts coffee in the other. Unfortunately, my good fortune didn't extend to my commute home, because in spite of my contempt for traffic, my travel plans had me leaving the office at exactly the worst possible time. I was placed at the pinnacle of Boston rush hour traffic and left at the mercy of the angry, burnt out commuters around me. Two and a half hours into what should have been an hour long commute, I made it home.

The Rest of the Week

After the horror show otherwise known as my commute home, I opted to take the train in for the rest of the week. I figured a 20 minute drive followed by a 45 minute train ride would be much less painful, especially because it's 45 minutes I don't have to spend behind the wheel. But alas, like the majority of things I think will work out, it wasn't nearly as smooth as I'd hoped. First, I went to a train station that had a closed down parking garage, then I proceeded to draw imaginary knots in the road trying to find the garage at the next train station. Eventually I parked, and proceeded to spend the next 45 minutes awkwardly bumping into strangers on the train because I clearly haven't earned my sea legs yet. After work, the train ride back was a similar game of body bumper cars, though this time I got to top it off by sitting in 20 minutes of traffic before I even escaped the parking garage. Wonderful.

So, how's it compare?

Clearly the commuting part of my day was not as buttery smooth as I had hoped, but it was far from the worst thing that's ever happened to someone, and millions of people perform similar commutes every day without complaint. Like anything else in life, I'm sure it's something you get used to. Plus, I had a ton of fun working out of the Boston office, so it was totally worth it. Other things being equal, my truck commute wins hands down. I can wake up in both places at 5:30 am and be at work at 8 am, fact. The difference is that when I wake up in the truck, I spend the 2.5 intervening hours exercising and pumping myself up for the day, whereas if I commute, those same 2.5 hours are spent basting myself in exhaust fumes and the sweat of fellow train-goers.

Obviously there are trade-offs here, and pretty much every other post will discuss the pros and cons of living in of a truck. My only point here, if there really even is one, is that the truck facilitates a stress-free, uneventful commute. And when I'm expected to do that five days a week for (more or less) the rest of my life, it's a pretty dramatic improvement to the quality of my life.

In a world where everything is prepackaged, replaceable, and easily disposable, trash is tragically an unavoidable by-product of living. Whether it's paper towels, tissues, plastic packaging, cleaning products, cardboard containers, clothing tags, receipts, pretty much every transaction you make is going to generate some type of waste. And waste is, like, generally bad, right? It takes up space, serves no real purpose, wastes resources and energy, and most importantly for truck folk, there's really no good place to put it.

If you live in a house, you probably put your trash on the curb once a week and the trash fairy comes and takes it away. You either pay the town or a contractor to send this fairy to your house. If you live in an apartment building or complex, chances are there's a communal trash heap/chute that you dump your undesirables into. As far as I'm aware, there's no truck-to-truck trash removal service, and quite frankly it would be pretty weird if there was. My strategy for managing waste was non-existent up until recently, and that was definitively a Bad Thing^TM.

Minimizing Waste

You're going to have to deal with some amount of trash, it's inevitable. However, the raw magnitude of refuse you generate will vary dramatically with how proactive you are in controlling it. Here are some of the things that help me minimize what I'm throwing away:

1. Buy less disposables. This one makes sense. Instead of going for paper towels, go for cloths instead. Instead of cleaning wipes, buy cleaning solution and some quality sponges. The whole "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" mentality works wonders here.
2. Buy the more expensive items used. Most of the time, when you buy something used, it's not going to have the original packaging, which (in my experience) accounts for most of what you have to throw away. It's always extra packaging: bubble wrap, cardboard, packing slips, instruction manuals etc. Buying used stuff eliminates that step, especially if you pick it up in person instead of having it shipped. This was my main antagonist, the Ikea packaging was ~50% of all the trash I had built up.
3. Just buy less stuff. A bit of reiterating what I was talking about in this post. Ask yourself, "Do I really need this? Does this actually improve my life in any articulable, perceptible way?" If the answer is no, great! You've just saved yourself money, space, and the burden of having more trash to toss out.

Managing Waste

Like I said, it all started with a trip to Ikea. I had successfully (and painfully) assembled the dresser, and I was left with a huge mass of cardboard and plastic wrap and all the other various fixings of the packaging. I did what seemed like the reasonable thing to do at the time: I took all of the trash, threw it in a big bag, and dumped the bag in a corner of the truck. This would have been fine and all, except that the bag was still there three months later. And every time I cleaned anything, or bought anything, or did pretty much anything other than sleep, there would always be some new piece of trash. Naturally, I threw it into that ever-growing black hole of bad decisions and didn't think any more of it.

It probably doesn't sound all that bad, it just sounds like a trash bag. Except that at this point in the story, it's filled with who knows how many random house-cleaning chemicals, discarded shampoo bottles, and random other waste that I've accumulated by being alive. Not only was I sleeping within a few feet of this near-definite biohazard, but if I've learned anything, it's that bugs will eat pretty much anything. And I had a whole lot of anything and everything in that bag. I wouldn't be entirely shocked if that's what was attracting all of my bug buddies.

And I'd still have that same mystery bag in my truck, had a friend not needed some help moving. Luckily they did though, unintentionally giving me the perfect opportunity to quietly rid myself of 20-ish pounds of God knows what into a dumpster in their apartment complex. But clearly that's not a sustainable solution; I'm not going to be consistently helping friends move. That said, I'm sure my friends enjoy knowing someone in possession of a moving truck. But still, if I can't rely on throwing trash in friends' dumpsters, what are my options?

Uhh, a landfill?

This is a pretty obvious option. You have trash, you need to get rid of it, you take it to the landfill. Simple and easy. The first problem is that most landfills don't like to take random trash. They'd prefer if you sorted it, placed it in separate bags, and other completely reasonable requests that I had no interest in complying with. Not a huge deal, I'm sure I could travel 50 or so miles and find one that would take my wad of trash in all of its unadulterated glory. In the grand scheme of things, a 50 mile drive actually isn't all that bad. It's inefficient for sure, and I'm not big on rampant inefficiency, but that's manageable since I would only be doing it every few months. But once I get there, I still have to pay for it, and on top of that, I'm dumping it straight from the box to their facilities, meaning some garbage guys and gals are going to be all up in my house. Like I've said before, I don't mind people seeing my situation, but I'd prefer not baring all to some complete strangers. Finally, I still have the aforementioned problem of building up trash for weeks or months at a time, an all-you-can-eat buffet for pests. Certainly not ideal.

Just toss it somewhere?

Definitely not. Aside from being straight up illegal to dump your trash in unauthorized dumpsters, it's also just incredibly rude and not my thing. I'm not trying to be the homeless guy creeping around foreign apartment complexes looking for a place to dump my trash under the cover of night. That's beyond weird. I'm also not going to ask my friends if I can dump my discards in their trash, because that's just as strange. In the same vein, it's also not their responsibility in the slightest. I'm the one who signed up to live in a truck, they shouldn't be responsible for any of the side effects or consequences.

Moderation.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized the main issue was one of quantity. It's easy to throw away a piece of trash, you just toss it in one of the million receptacles blending into the background of your day-to-day activities. If you let it accumulate though, it quickly becomes a cumbersome blob, an entity all its own. So the solution I went with was a simple one: buy some small, biodegradable trash bags, and every time you generate trash, throw it in one of those bags, then toss it out the next time you're out and about. Tossing a small bag into a public trash can isn't a burden to anyone, and it saves me from building a trash stockpile in the same place I sleep. Combine this with the above practices for minimizing trash in the first place, and you have a reasonable, low-cost, sustainable system. I've found that I only really generate trash one or two nights a week now that I'm all settled in, and it's usually just a tissue or old cloth while cleaning or exterminating the occasional bug who wanders into my crosshairs.

So that's that. Take a little bit of planning, add some small bags, develop a process that takes up no more than 2 minutes and you have a solid recipe for keeping your truck home free of trash.

People have all sorts of suggestions for how you should spend your 20s, and they land pretty much everywhere on the spectrum. Some say you should work extra hard to provide yourself with a solid foundation for the future. After all, you're young and void of life's later obligations, put that time to good use. Others say you shouldn't squander it toiling your best years away in monotony. As is probably evident from some of my other writings (read: ramblings), I fall somewhere in the middle. On one hand, I recognize that I'm setting up the foundation for the rest of my life right now (little to no expenses, investing early, yadda yadda yadda). But on the other hand, as I'm one to note, I only get to be this young once and I'll be damned if I don't make some memories to reminisce about when I'm old and gray. Plus, one of the main reasons I decided on the truck life was to minimize the time until I could start travelling.

Anyway, this is all just a long-winded introduction for the actual topic at hand: striking a work-life balance when you literally live at work. Sounds tricky, right? When your lifestyle blurs the line between working and just living, how do you make sure that they don't amalgamate into one never-ending workday? Early on, this was a legitimate issue for me, and I didn't even realize it because of how natural it felt. During the week, I would wake up, head to a gym (at work), shower (at work), work (obviously at work), and hang around the office (working, mainly) until it was time to go to sleep. Rinse and repeat. It took me a few weeks of this routine to realize that I was spending 70-80% of my waking time working. I ever-so-briefly became a zombie, constantly and mindlessly working away at whatever problem I was given, reduced to a machine that turned food into code and waste. It wasn't that my workload was too high, I just didn't know what else to do, and that happened to be the path of least resistance. However, after a few months of experimentation, I think I've figured out a reasonable formula, but I still have to be very cognizant of what I'm doing, lest I slip back into my bad work habits of yestermonth.

Separation of Truck and Work

The first thing I had to do was to realize that just because I'm relying on work for most of my basic needs (showers, bathrooms, food, laundry, gym, etc), I can still draw a clear line between when I'm working and furthering the goals of the company I work for, and when I'm enjoying my own free time. Recognizing this was the first step, once I was able to understand the difference, I just had to define which was when, and add a little bit of regimentation into the mix.

Set Work Hours - And Stick to Them

The first thing I did was put my foot down and establish what time of day I would be working. Any other time of day, that's Brandon time. I decided that 8-9 hours a day of working was more than enough to get everything done that I needed/wanted to. There is very little I currently work on that is too important to wait until tomorrow if it's getting late. And I figure I normally workout, shower, and head to breakfast by 8 am, so 8 until 4 or 4:30 pm sounds like a pretty reasonable work schedule. Okay, let's say I've done my time and 4 o'clock rolls around, what's next?

Find Places to Go After Work

I quickly realized that it wasn't quite enough to just say that work ended at 4, I had to physically get up and go somewhere. Sure, I could just sit at my desk and work on my blog, or plan my travels, or code up some side projects, but being physically located at my desk meant that I was much more likely to accidentally get wrangled back into doing work stuff. Plus, being at my desk for 10-12 hours a day, every day, probably looks pretty strange to my coworkers. The solution? Go somewhere else. If I don't have any other plans, I have a mental list of locations to hang out and enjoy my own time. Some of them are just different places on campus far from my desk, others are cafes downtown, and still others are random places near where I pick up mail from my faux mailbox. So that covers the week, but you're going to need a new game plan for when Saturday shows up at your truck door.

Planning Weekend Activities

I like to wake up bright and early Saturday morning and do all of the week's laundry.* Up until last month, I had a laundry room in the same building as my office. That sounds super convenient, but what ended up happening was that I'd hang out at my desk while I was waiting for my laundry to finish, and inevitably my feeble mind would wander back onto work topics. I'm sure someone with a better understanding of basic human psychology would be able to explain why that happens, but I certainly don't have that answer. In any case, doing laundry in a building other than my own, far from the temptation of productivity, solved that problem. My routine is now doing laundry and exercise in parallel, killing two proverbial birds with one proverbial stone. That only accounts for 2 or 3 hours of my whole weekend though, surely there's more to it. After all, the truck likes to pretend it's an oven during the day. It's not as if I can just hang out in there all afternoon, and I actually prefer it that way. At some point I'll dedicate a whole post on how to have a successful night on the town with the truck in tow. For now, just know that I prefill my weekends with cafes, trips to the city, parks, errands, events, movies, and questionably appropriate levels of alcohol. Note the emphasis on the "pre" part, if I don't plan things out in advance, I'll inevitably end up back at my desk, which I consider a Bad Thing^TM.

Know Your Limitations

Living in a truck makes some types of fairly normal leisure activities more difficult. Namely, not having a TV/reliable internet (and by extension cable/Netflix) means I can't just plop on the couch, throw on some Beverly Honey Hills Ninja Boo Boo Warrior, and let my brain matter leak out of my ears. I can't watch Netflix on my laptop in the truck because I don't get quite good enough reception, and I just feel off doing it at work. I'm okay with this though, because it almost forces me to find something more productive to do, which I don't mind in the slightest.

The takeaway here is that having a life of your own outside of work is important, truck or not. Truck living is easier in some ways, harder in others, and just plain stranger in some places. But making a concerted effort to only give a portion of your soul to your employer means that you still have some left over to put towards your dreams. Maybe a little too sappy and idealized, but the sentiment is there.

*_{Sidenote: This was definitely a good habit to get into. It turns out a full laundry bag of sweaty gym clothes can make a small confined space, say a box truck for example, smell pretty bad, pretty quickly. So regularly purging the demons of well-worn clothing from my life improves my quality of living fairly dramatically.}