
I secretly lived in my office for 500 days - 0cool
http://www.salon.com/2015/04/30/i_secretly_lived_in_my_office_for_500_days/
======
mcculley
I once worked 2nd and 3rd shift for a project that encouraged such hours
because there weren't enough servers to handle the load for everybody during
the day. A few mornings around 5:00 AM I heard a weird high pitched noise but
it went away before I could figure out what it was. The next time it happened,
I immediately hunted it down. I narrowed it down to the men's restroom and
opened the door to find a man standing in the nude using a blow dryer. He was
a contractor who had moved from another state. He had been sleeping in his
truck and using the shower in the employee restroom every morning.

I became less enthusiastic about hunting down the source of weird noises after
that.

------
geomark
Some years ago I worked at a large aerospace firm in the L.A. area. 20,000
people worked there and with that many people there are bound to be a few odd
ones. Several lived in their cars in the parking lot. But the weirdest one was
the guy who was living in the ceiling above his office. The story goes that
one night a security guard noticed some movement in a hallway and went to
investigate. He saw some wet footprints that led from the bathroom into an
office and right up the wall. He pushed up the ceiling panel and found a room
outfitted with lights, seat cushions and a sleeping bag. The guy had
apparently been living up there for several months.

~~~
pestaa
What a sad way to waste your life. I'm sure he had other options considering
he worked in an office at a "large aerospace firm," right?

~~~
bigtunacan
I really don't get this attitude. It's not for everyone, but it's a great way
to save money. Do this for awhile and you can save up to purchase a home
outright or at least have a sizable down payment.

I interviewed for a job in Chicago with a company where one of the employees
lived in the office. Unlike the Salon article, this employee openly asked if
he could live in the office to save himself the cost of rent. The employer had
no issue with it. In his office there was a small basic cot that he slept on.

~~~
sliverstorm
I think it boils down to "work now, play later" vs. "work now, play now"
philosophies.

On the one hand you have the people who give 100% of their day to work, with
the goal of building up F-U money and never working again.

On the other hand you have the people who make less & save less and plan on
working longer, but take more of their day for themselves.

I don't think I can say either philosophy is wrong, but they definitely don't
see eye-to-eye. They have different value systems.

~~~
crucifiction
If cumulative happiness over your life is the goal then the first one is
clearly the wrong approach. The probability that you will die/become
incapacitated/have health issues before you can either build up or enjoy for a
long period of time that F-U money puts a discount on the entire end state.

~~~
Retra
Why would cumulative happiness be a goal? Happiness is not a things that
accumulates.

~~~
yoplait_
... Time spent happy does accumulate.

That means he wants to have spent a life being happy as much as possible.

~~~
Retra
No, _memories_ accumulate. And in my very normal and apparently common
experience, rose colored glasses and "I earned my success by struggling" make
up for any past lack of happiness I've experienced. Those memories are white-
washed unless you've had some severe trauma.

So the only thing that really matters is if you currently happy, or if you are
about to become happy. Nothing accumulates.

~~~
yoplait_
if memories accumulate, something accumulates.

If you're the kind of person that likes to go up the ladder, every step up
provides you with happiness so I don't think your story is a counter example.

------
netman21
I used to do this when I was an executive at a software firm in Boulder,
Colorado. I maintained a home in another state but commuted to Boulder every
week. For a while I had a great deal on a shared condo but when the owner sold
it I was faced with staying in hotels or... sleeping in my cubicle under the
desk. There was a shower for employees so I would just get up early and be
ready to go by 6 am. No one ever discovered me in my sleeping bag.

~~~
marktangotango
Why didn't you telecommute? I've often considered taking a high salary job in
a high cost of living area ie san francisco, boston, or new york. And
maintaining a residence somewhere cheaper. If one could arrange a schedule of
four ten hour days it might be doable.

The obvious problems are part time housing and travel ie air fare. How did you
handle this? Has anyone done this?

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peter303
I read a couple of essays from googliers who did this. Google provides nearly
all your needs in office- free food, recreation, laundry- save a many hour
sleep spot. And people work and hang out 12, 15 hours then. So why pay high
rent only to sleep and put up with terrible commute traffic. In the open
office environment of new techs finding sleep spots is harder. But many sleep
in their vehicles in a climate rarely freezing or roasting.

~~~
ZanyProgrammer
If I got paid a Google salary, there's no way I couldn't afford to find an
apartment in Santa Clara County. Note I didn't say fancy condo, 3 bedroom
ranch house with two car garage and spacious lawn, or townhouse.

~~~
VLM
I talked to a google recruiter a couple years ago and if I took the job and
moved to mountain view, my current lifestyle of "3 bedroom ranch house with
two car garage and spacious lawn" would be utterly impossible, so goodbye.

This was very close to the national peak of the housing bubble, things may
have gotten better since then.

~~~
ZanyProgrammer
The problem is that you insist on living the mid 20th century American Dream.

~~~
lawnchair_larry
Not really. That's current day for most of the US. It's SF that is broken.

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bgroins
The main problem I see that led to this situation is the author picking one of
the most expensive places in LA to live, Venice Beach. The author could have
chosen a much less expensive (but less glamorous) area, say in Koreatown or
somewhere else inland. There are lower rent areas in LA, you just need to
compromise your lifestyle a bit.

~~~
ebiester
The compromise is losing 2 hours a day in your car. This is why I didn't take
the job in LA.

~~~
melling
Google Maps says Koreatown and Venice Beach are 15 miles apart. Some time late
in the 21st Century or early 22nd Century humans will realize that great mass
transit can really make life more enjoyable, and that'll be a 15 minute
commute. It's pretty amazing how bad things have to get before people wake up.

~~~
waps
Having commuted to work in Brussels, a city often described as having great
mass transit (and when it's not busy, that's absolutely true)

Here's my observations :

1) despite not paying for itself (the state pays hundreds of millions yearly
to make up for the losses of the public transport system) it's a little bit
more expensive, per kilometer, than taking a car (train + metro vs gas). Even
for longer distances, planes are actually cheaper than trains. If you get a
company car and just pay for fuel, it's half the price. Otoh, parking in some
places drives the price back up (but then you can park near a metro station
and only use public transport for the last kilometer or so. Or a folding bike,
I've had colleagues who did that).

2) when you want to use them to commute, they're not just busy, they're off
the scale full. You can only stand and sometimes you miss your train because
you literally can't squeeze in. (I tried first class for a week, but that
makes it a multiple of the price of using a car, and you still need to stand)

3) the comfort level, compared to a car, is off the scale worse. You can take
things along in a car, whereas there is a clear and very small capacity limit
to what you can take on public transport. 40kg, backpack size, no more,
groceries for a week is doable, furniture, electronics, not really doable (I
tend to put those on a bike and walk home beside it). And I'm a 200 pound guy,
I'd hate to think what the limits are if you're 80 pounds.

4) In Belgium you have one or two days per year where cars can't actually get
around in the capital (frozen snow on the road combined with a lot of sloped
roads makes it just too dangerous for cars, even if you walk you'll probably
fall down painfully). A few more days accidents on the highways will mean
you're late by 2-3 hours (I was once 7 hours late due to traffic). That is
less than the days public transport doesn't work due to union actions. Because
of the amount of times this happens, your boss will not, in fact understand.
5-10 days a year you can't get to work using public transport. With a car, 5
days a year you'll be 2 hours late and 1 day you won't show up.

5) If you calculate cars versus public transit capacities, it is obvious :
cars scale better (I think this is mostly because car capacity expansions are
cheaper for the government to implement, so they happen every time a rightist
government comes to power in a given municipality, car capacity expansions
happen, usually by diverting traffic. Public transport expansions happen once
in a decade at best, and one line at a time. Recently a public transport line
to the airport made traffic on a few lines much better)

Imho, the solution to public transport is fast, efficient, driver-less, door-
to-door, car sharing. That can work, and won't be bogged down into a morass of
substandard service by unions. We need to improve matters, and I no longer
believe buses and trains and even metros are the answer.

Here's an article describing things from the perspective of a commuter
[http://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/pseudosc/masstransit.htm](http://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/pseudosc/masstransit.htm)

~~~
Retric
Cars are terrible at scaling. The core problem is roads take a lot of surface
area so adding traffic lanes reduces density which forces longer commutes. Add
to that you need parking at both ends which reduces density further.
[http://streets.mn/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/car-vs-bike-
vs-...](http://streets.mn/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/car-vs-bike-vs-bus.jpg)

They are also worse for the environment and kill lot's of people.

PS: Cars also have huge direct and indirect subsides, consider who pays for
your parking space while at work? Hypothetically in a major city ~2 * 100$
parking spaces + ~100$ insurance = ~300$ a month or 15$ per workday day even
if your car, gas, and roads where free.

~~~
waps
You're absolutely right that cars don't scale well in theory, but when it
comes to expanding capacity when that is necessary, cars outperform public
transport. This is mostly because space is not often in short supply, but
money always is.

Cars seem to have much better support for their expansion from governments,
and that this results in better real-world scaling. It seems to me this is in
no small part because car infrastructure is way cheaper per extra person of
capacity than mass transit.

Both cars and mass-transit have huge subsidies, at least in Belgium.

~~~
Retric
Belgium has decent public transit and is below the point where cars have
issues with scaling. It's really more an issue with sprawling mega city's
where the suburbs can only expand in one direction. So ocean / mountains on
one side, north and south huge city's so everyone is coming from one
direction.

------
digisign
Must have been pioneer in this area. A bit over ten years ago I once had a
good job in Santa Monica, but was tired of paying ridiculous rent for a
shoebox that I was never at. So I packed up, slept in the underground parking
garage, and went to the gym every day.

Was in the best shape of my life and saved 40k that year, which I later turned
into a 2-year trip around the world. Was definitely worth it.

~~~
copsarebastards
How did that work for your sex life? Bringing ladies home to a van is my main
reason for not wanting to do this.

~~~
digisign
I think I was single the first half. I did meet a nice girl the second, but i
strung it a long for a while, and even then she had low self esteem an so she
didnt give me a hard time about it.

~~~
copsarebastards
What an unsavory answer.

I guess I can kind of answer my own question, though. An adult woman who
shares my values wouldn't care if I lived in a van.

~~~
mixmastamyk
Would you prefer a less-truthful one?

------
rafaelnonato
I wonder what would happen if this form of housing became more popular. Maybe
soon we'll be reading accounts about two office-overnighters who inevitably
found about one another.

~~~
dghughes
It sounds like something Japanese people would do since apparently the
commutes in Japan are horrifying long.

Those capsule hotels in Japan have been around for quite awhile.

I've thought of creating an apartment building of pod apartments it seems to
be a Millenials thing to couch surf or share apartments.

~~~
jacalata
Seattle has aPodments - [http://apodment.com/](http://apodment.com/)

~~~
hedgehog
The name is misleading, they're just very small apartments with a design
carefully chosen to minimize regulatory constraints & tax burden. They go for
about $600 a month.

------
peter303
This was not rare in college. One school had a 364/24 library and students
took over a study correl with their books and a few belongings. Others lived
in closets or cars. I think the janitors knew but did not care. I did this a
few times myself when there were gaps between residences and I run out of
placed to crash.

~~~
lotharbot
When I was in grad school, one of the other grad students lived in his office.
We all looked the other way when he shifted the desks around (leaving a couple
of the other grad student desks kind of cramped) to make room for a sofa.
"Yeah, that'll be real comfortable to... sit on... while doing math. That's
what it's for!"

I'm pretty sure all of the faculty and staff in our department knew about it
too.

~~~
pavel_lishin
I think there's a difference between doing this in _your_ office, and an
office you share with others.

If I needed to stay late to study, or grade assignments, or whatnot, I would
be pretty annoyed if my office-mate asked me to leave because it was his bed-
time.

~~~
detaro
I think "throwing people working late out" isn't one of the things you get
away with doing that.

------
allemagne
It might change for me in the future, but at this point in my life commuting
seems really inefficient and annoying. It's not just the time lost while in
your car (I listen to music anyway) but the stress of having to basically
exist in two places.

I appreciated the Thoreau references in the article. Perhaps moving into my
office isn't the best simplifying solution, but it's a nice parable for
improving daily routine.

~~~
Chinjut
Mind you, Thoreau would probably abandon the office-drone life altogether...

------
cafard
At the end of the 1980s, I worked with a guy who was forty, newly divorced
after about twenty years of marriage, and out to have the early twenties that
he considered he had missed. After hearing about a late-night burglar alarm
once or twice in the building, I asked the programming section's
administrative assistant whether this guy was living in his office. She looked
away, and didn't want to discuss it. I don't think that he was destitute, just
thrifty. He had, he said, a twenty-one-year-old girlfriend, but I suppose he
couldn't stay with her all the time.

------
austenallred
I lived in my car under similar-ish circumstances. Was getting a company off
the ground, needed to be in Silicon Valley to raise money, was unwilling to
pay $800/month for a single terrible bedroom, and had read a lot of Thoreau
and already given away almost everything I owned to vagabond around China.

It's kind of a pain living on $200-300 a month, but it's really not that bad.
You start to realize that most of the stuff people spend their whole lives
working to buy they don't need. The forced routine of going to a gym is one
I've tried not to get out of the habit of. I actually think it's a very
healthy way of life, assuming you find a way to eat well.

More here: [http://austenallred.com/voluntarily-homeless-in-silicon-
vall...](http://austenallred.com/voluntarily-homeless-in-silicon-valley/)

Now I have an apartment (am married with a baby on the way), but I put about
half of what I earn into killing debt/building a savings. I'll be debt-free
next month with 10k in the bank, having had 0 savings and 20k in debt a couple
years ago. I only pay myself 50k/yr.

~~~
ultimape
How do you eat well and not cost a ton of money? I imagine you don't get the
opportunity to store food or cook it effectively.

------
facepalm
Maybe companies could start offering that as a perk. Perhaps something like
the Japanese Capsule Hotels? A place to sleep in the office.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capsule_hotel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capsule_hotel)

------
kazinator
I did that for just a little while, when going through a divorce. It was kind
of fun. I had what I needed at work: shower room, place to sleep, Internet
access.

A fridge to keep groceries and a microwave oven too.

I ate canned food, combined with fresh vegetables.

I discovered that using a microwave, you can easily bring water to a simmer in
a plastic container, and by that means, you can cook pasta very nicely. (I'm
sure it saves energy compared to stove top pasta boiling. It takes about ten
minutes (same) and the wattage of the microwave is not only lower, but you
don't use it on full power.)

Toaster ovens help too. If your office doesn't have one, just go out and buy
one. You can revive a store-bought frozen casserole dish in one of those
things.

------
jqm
I lived in a grape cooler on a grape farm for several months once (in the non-
cooled part). It had a bathroom but no shower. I made one out back on a cement
slab with a hose, a garden water wand and a tarp.

~~~
kgabis
Paradise! ([https://youtu.be/DAtSw3daGoo](https://youtu.be/DAtSw3daGoo))

------
runj__
I've slept in my office a few times and could probably do it for a month or so
without anyone being mad about it. I'm not a morning person at all so being
first at the office is a great feeling.

------
hellbanner
One day I got into work much earlier than usual. I didn't think anyone else
was there until I started typing. A programmer who had fallen asleep in his
chair awoke with a startle, then started typing himself.

Funnily, he always left early in the day and was lauded by his teammates for
doing the hard work in the morning when no one was around so he could
concentrate.

------
justincormack
I don't recommend doing it in a small startup in a small office where people
come in early and stay late - we had someone trying to live and work nights in
our office in Shoreditch years ago, and he did get noticed after a while.

------
mikro2nd
There was a Doonesbury strip that did this. Seems to be too old for the
doonesbury.com to have in their online archives, though.

------
shanemhansen
I've heard people who live with their parents proclaim how great it is. They
don't have to pay rent or do their own laundry or anything us terrible
materialistic people do. It's great for saving money. For reasons that I hope
would be obvious I'm not interested in that sort of "lifestyle choice".

This guy is worse because at least people who are mooching off their parents
aren't literally stealing from them.

~~~
ldd
I live with my mom and my sister and do the cleaning, cook daily for our lunch
and dinner, sweep and mop the floor, buy groceries, handle bills, etc.

Most of the people that I know that live at home do the same. How exactly are
we mooching off our parents?

~~~
xkcd-sucks
Maybe there's a trend towards shaming families because families are economic
structures which compete with governments and corporations?

