I secretly lived in my office for 500 days(salon.com) |
I secretly lived in my office for 500 days(salon.com) |
I became less enthusiastic about hunting down the source of weird noises after that.
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.
The obvious problems are part time housing and travel ie air fare. How did you handle this? Has anyone done this?
Sure, an a google or facebook or linkedin salary, you can afford a place to live in the area, no question. But two or three grand a month, post tax? That's still a lot of money. I mean, it's not the choice I would make, but I can totally understand why someone would want to live in the office, even though they could instead spend a lot of money on rent.
There's a lot of reasons why you'd want to save that money; Just one reason: How many of us remember 1999? If this is anything like that, a lot of us will only have a few years in this industry, or we will have a few years in this industry, then spend half a decade doing jobs that pay dramatically less before the economy recovers to the point where we can work in this industry again. Salting away as much cash as you can while the hunting is easy is not a bad idea.
This was very close to the national peak of the housing bubble, things may have gotten better since then.
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.
Also he might have had a big car, van, trailer or whatnot.
Something to think about when you have that kind of savings going on, is taking a weekend getaway every single weekend is quite affordable.
That sounds like it could be the basis of a rom-com screenplay.
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.
Simple. Due to liability/insurance/fire-safety concerns, it would be cracked down upon. Where not cracked down upon, it would develop into a shady black market.
I'm pretty sure all of the faculty and staff in our department knew about it too.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
This guy is worse because at least people who are mooching off their parents aren't literally stealing from them.
Most of the people that I know that live at home do the same. How exactly are we mooching off our parents?
In the end I ended up saving for an apartment and got my own place, and broke up with my girlfriend it just wasn't working out. It was a story and an adventure I'll never forget :)
I'm not super interested in buying a house here, since >half a million for a tiny spot of land in the suburbs with a tiny 2-bedroom house that needs major repairs is absurd to me. I'd much rather live in an office while paying off a house in Fiji, then move into that in 20 years and work a lot less.
Another alternative is living in an RV. I've considered this, and since Bay Area rent can pay off a really really really nice RV in ~5 years, it's s viable option. The biggest hiccup is where to park it; national parks would be awesome, but they're not free, Internet access is spotty, and it'd be a long commute every day. Even working remotely, month-to-month RV park communities can be over $500 a month, so that doesn't quite feel like you're beating the game of rent-seeking by property owners as much as I'd like. RVs also require maintenance and probably won't last as long as a house, but even if you get 20 years out of it, or buy it used and sell it where the depreciation is much less per month than rent would have been, you can come out ahead.
Spend about 10k for a used casita travel trailer. The trailer fits in an area the size of a compact car. Rent/buy a parking spot and setup the trailer. In the big city you can get gym membership to cover sewage and showers. For internet you can easily purchase some sort of cellular or wifi service. Almost everything I need would be covered.
It's not for everyone but for myself, I have no qualms about small spaces, so I'd totally execute this plan if it wasn't for the complication of accessing the power grid. There's really no easy way to get a power line up into the trailer if it's in some parking garage. Perhaps solar? but that leads to other complications.
Problem is that it could barely work as long as the nation was a globe spanning empire.
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.
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.
I'd be interested how it affects insurance.
So if they found out this was a factor in something they would normally pay out for, you can be sure they wouldn't.
It's too congested even for buses to quickly get by. I've walked/biked 5+ miles faster than it took a bus to get where I was going during peak traffic hours, and I am no avid runner/biker.
I've spent 30 minutes trying to go 1 mile.
I've been stuck in completely stopped traffic at 3AM caused by multiple concerts let out at the same time
One time I remember walking to the bank 2 blocks from my house. It took about 5 minutes because I was taking it slow. By the time I got out of the bank, and went outside to walk home, an impromptu Katy Perry concert had started (That's Hollywood & Highland for you) and there wasn't even walking room for blocks in every direction. I ended up having to loop around everything and it took me 20+ minutes to get home.
Basically, the traffic/transit in LA is not a predictable monster. When it comes to getting from point A to point B, no quick glance at a map can help you guess how long anything will take.
Nah, the second phase of the Expo line will be complete in a few years, and the purple line will be finished long before then, too. Won't be quite 15 minutes, but should be under 25.
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
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.
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.
The TCO of a wholly-owned personal transportation vehicle is substantially more than the cost of fuel. It's hard to come out ahead, financially, unless you're a semi-decent mechanic, don't mind buying old machinery, and don't value your spare time very highly. Something bombproof and frugal, like a C90 underbone, could do well. A car, not so much.
(I have met people who, for example, might commute from Berlin to Dresden daily and it always boggled my mind)
Car : euro 0.4/km, travel time into brussels during heavy traffic : about 50 minutes, 30 if I'm willing to work 6am-3pm (I'm not). 21 (working days per month) * 35 (kilometer) * 2 (there and back) * 0.4 = 580 euro/month, 700 if you finance it using a loan (I don't need to). This pays for a comfortable "monovolume" car (big enough for a family, but certainly not a big car by Belgian standards). Note that this effectively comes with all sorts of bonuses, greater comfort, protection from the weather, and much cheaper and quicker groceries. I don't need parking where I work, but if I did it'd be another 50-100 per month everywhere except the European quarter. If we're talking a company car (tax deductible for companies in Belgium and thus very common), cost drops to 200-300 euros, and some companies (ie. if you're willing to do IT consultancy), drops to 100-300, depending on car, deducted from pre-tax pay. This is assuming the car's value goes to zero over a period of 4 years, whereas in practice I've always sold my cars for between 3-4000 euros after 4 years.
Public transport travel time : at least 2 hours (mostly due to waiting). Cost of bus card + train card (for one trajectory only during week days) = 150 to 300 euros (bus, depending on whether you need bus in one or two cities, so if you can get from home -> station without bus or from work -> station without bus, it's 150, otherwise 300. For me it's 300), plus 150 for the train. Add to that the cost of various other trips that you'll need to make that aren't covered by this, but are covered by having a car, and you easily get to 600 euros per month (groceries, going to town, visiting people, ...). Since I drop off kids at school using the car, if I included the cost to do that using public transport too, it'd be over 700 (2*60 euros per month to have the school bus pick them up on a street where I would worry every day they they might get killed, plus it would prevent me from leaving for work until they are on the bus).
Oh, and for that price, you get this : https://pbs.twimg.com/media/By62kxwIAAAX3Om.jpg:large
It's not a contest. Car is way cheaper, even disregarding the difference in comfort. Is that because of government subsidies for the car ? Yes. Otoh, the government also sponsors the mass transit quite a bit. How does it stack up in "real" costs ? I don't know. How much would the other disadvantages of using public transport add up to ? Don't know, but I don't think it's zero. (much less free time, less time working because of the kids limits, ...)
Of course it depends on the trajectory you take. If I had to "cross" Brussels (east-west or north-south), I'd take the train, and I know people who do so, but I'd also find another job or move, because it's simply not doable.
- That you be really happy 2 days
- That you be fairly happy 90 days
That means he wants to have spent a life being happy as much as possible.
So the only thing that really matters is if you currently happy, or if you are about to become happy. Nothing 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.
