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.

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.

Traffic is a strange beast. Sometimes it comes from nowhere at all, wreaking unspeakable havoc on your itinerary, eviscerating your plans with startling efficiency. Other times it's entirely expected, and entirely unavoidable. In any case, nobody particular enjoys traffic (I certainly don't), it's an environmental tragedy, and it's ruthlessly wasteful. By all accounts, traffic is a Bad Thing^TM.

Call it schadenfreude if you want, but on days when I'm not up at the crack of dawn, there's nothing I love more than rolling out of bed at my leisure, lazing my way to the gym, hopping on a treadmill and watching the brutal commute thousands and thousands of people are enduring. It's especially glorious because a large percentage of these people are, at a snail's pace, traveling to exactly where I already am. And it only took me 5 minutes to get here. My co-worker came in today exhausted because commuting from his house, a 15 minute stroll not during rush hours, took him a whopping hour and a half this morning, for no reason in particular. It's especially tragic because he still has a commute home to look forward to, which will undoubtedly be plagued by the same atrocities. I don't have the constitution or resolve to handle such a soul-crushing experience on a twice-daily basis, but power to everyone who does.

Living close to (read: at) work is certainly nice, especially under the lens of traffic, but don't get me wrong, it does indeed have its downsides, and I'd be lying if I said it was all sunshine and roses. For one, living at work makes it really easy to have a bad work/life balance, especially on weekends. If I'm not keeping busy enough, it's tempting to just go into work and get some stuff done, maybe do some laundry and hang out for a bit. I find that because I don't have a living room to hang out in, I have to keep reminding myself to get out and constantly have activities planned. All things considered though, I think the grueling commute is what burns a lot of people out, and the time and energy and resources I save by not having to endure that play a huge role in keeping me happy and productive as I work towards my larger goals.

As a forewarning, this post doesn't ^really provide tips on how to be invisible, it's more of an observation of human nature.

One of my biggest stressors when I was considering living in a van, as is undoubtedly evident from my earlier posts, was my unshakable fear that I was going to be caught, arrested, or otherwise reprimanded. I was worried that I wouldn't be discreet enough, or I'd make some grave mistake one day, or anything but a perfectly executed ninja-esque routine would spell my end. One too many loud creaks at night, not closing the back gate quietly enough, climbing out at the exact wrong time, parking in the wrong place, etc, the ways I could screw things up seemed limitless. But a fortuitous combination of rote observation and apparent realization led me to the following declaration:

The Realization

The realization that I had was that the vast majority of bad things that could happen to me required another person. Someone to see (and subsequently report) me, someone to tell me I needed to leave, someone to be so taken aback by my (in my opinion, untheatrical) actions that they saw it entirely necessary to go out of their way and see that something is done about it, etc, nothing truly bad could happen to me without a definitive, intentional action from another human being. Understanding this, my very survival (as a box-truck inhabitant), hinged on one of the two following things being true:

1. Nobody ever seeing me
or
2. Nobody feeling inclined to interfere

The Observation

If one of those two above-mentioned things were to be true, everything might just work out.

Nobody Ever Seeing Me

If nobody ever sees me, nobody can really intentionally act against me, right? This case falls in line with my initial musings, that if I'm invisible, I'll be fine. If I can ensure that no single human being ever sees me entering, being in, or exiting the box truck, and that nobody ever questions its existence, and the moon and stars align, I might just make it out squeaky clean: a smooth, friction-less experience. However, that seems extremely unlikely. I can do my best to minimize contact with other human beings: I can leave early in the morning and come back late at night, I can take careful, quiet, deliberate footsteps, I can open and close the noisy back gate slowly and tenderly, etc. There are a million things I can do to make myself as invisible as possible, but regardless of how sneaky I am, at the end of the day, I can't control all the factors, or chance for that matter. Even if I listen super carefully before leaving the truck, there could still be someone parked right next to me, watching me get out of my truck. Or maybe a security car rolls by right as I'm hoping in. Or maybe a family on vacation bizarrely takes photographs for ten minutes with me and my half-open tailgate in the not-so-distant background. As you may have guessed, all these things have happened. They're just a product of random chance, and regardless of how careful and calculating I am, they're going to continue to happen.

So if it's impossible to stop people from seeing me, I guess I'll just have to hope that nobody steps in, right? Here's where I start making some useful observations.

Nobody Feeling Inclined to Interfere

Like I said above, I have random run-ins all the time. People may not understand what I'm doing or what's going on, but I'm definitely noticed by strangers on a daily basis as I go about my mundane truck routine. So, knowing that, how do I manage to not get caught, or arrested, or whatever else I was worried would happen to me? I'll tell you how. It's because nobody cares. I'm going to say that again, because it's super important:

Nobody cares.

These are other human beings who are going about their own lives, with their own preoccupations, their own responsibilities, their own concerns. My life's brief collision with theirs barely even registers as an event in their lives, in most cases it doesn't even warrant conscious thought. I'm as relevant to their life as a traffic light, and that's a good thing. They have their own stack of worries to mull over, what motivation do they have to exert a non-negligible energy to disrupt my life. Humans are a lot like the electrons I spent so much of college learning about, in most cases, we're perfectly happy taking the path of least resistance. And in the case of fleeting interactions with random strangers, the path of least resistance is to do nothing at all.

And that's why I'm completely fine. Not because I'm a perfect master of stealth, but because people can't be bothered. At best, they've immediately replaced the experience of seeing me with much more real, pressing issues in their lives, and at worst, I've become a bit of conversation-fodder for a dinner table discussion that night. In both extrema, I'm soon forgotten and nobody is mounting an offensive against me or my lifestyle, and that's exactly why I sleep so soundly at night.

In this post, I mention that, upon my arrival, there were already several other vehicles that looked like they could be home to serial killers, the mentally-insane, or otherwise psychologically degenerate human beings. Some of the vehicles, namely a truck and a few RVs, move around occasionally, a sure sign of life. Others, like the hippie van pictured above on the far right, have not moved in the two months I've been here. However, despite these clear signs of organic life, I had never actually encountered any other people who were Livin' La Vida Loca(motive).

That is, until last week.

Allow me to set the scene, as I sometimes do. It's a Monday night, nearly indistinguishable from most others. If anything were to set it apart, it'd be my general tardiness in getting back to the box. It's about 10 PM at this point, well-beyond sunset, a deviance from my normal 9 PM arrival. I've just finished washing up and biking back to my home, and I'm walking across the parking lot when I see someone get out of the truck pictured above, center. I can hardly contain my excitement, after all, I'm finally making contact, a flesh and bone confirmation that I'm not alone in my endeavors. My change in pace or direction must have come to their attention, because they immediately started looking around nervously, which makes sense; they didn't know what my intentions were. I introduce myself, and let him know that I'm the occupant of the truck next door, which naturally brings him relief. Among all of the possible reasons someone would approach you in a parking lot, "wanting to meet the neighbors" is probably the best one.

There was a little bit of a language barrier, but from what I gathered, he had driven here from a few states over in his truck. Once he got out here, he hopped on Craigslist and found a camper for around $1,000, which is definitely an interesting (and even more frugal) approach. He's only interning here, so his arrangement is more temporary. I gave him a brief tour of my dwelling, which he commended on its spacious, open floor plan. We spoke for a few minutes about the various difficulties we've come across and where we park and other normal truck-person conversation, then we parted ways.

So there it is. I've officially met my first real-life neighbor. In the week since, I've run into him a few times walking to and from the box, and even once out on the road. If nothing else, it's nice having some tangible proof that even if I am insane, I'm not the only one.