As I've mentioned before, I drove buses in a past life (read: two months ago). That meant that in Massachusetts, I had a Commercial Driver's License. The bus company that I had worked for over the course of the past four years graciously trained their drivers and paid them, but in the Real World^TM, obtaining a CDL can be super expensive. Most driving school websites don't list their prices, but this one has a quote of $225 for a 2-hour private lesson. Considering you need ~50 hours of instruction and driving experience to take the test (which is another $300 on that site), that puts the cost of a CDL at over $5,000. But why am I talking about the price of a CDL? Well initially, I was worried that I'd need one to drive my box truck legally, then after a bit of research in the California CDL Handbook, I found that:

You may drive a 2-axle vehicle with a GVWR of 26,000 lbs. or less with a basic class C license.

-California CDL Handbook, 2014-2015

I'm not that great at estimation, but I'm willing to bet the box truck weighs less than 13 tons, and I think it's a 2-axle vehicle. And this all makes sense, because it's just a decommissioned Budget truck (you can still see the faded lettering on the front). But anyway, after I realized that I didn't need to keep my CDL, I found out that the conversion process was as simple as taking a few written knowledge tests about large vehicles, air brakes, and how to drive with tons of passengers. This was pretty cool, because like I said before, CDLs are expensive, and it can't hurt to have one. That way, if software engineering doesn't pan out for me, I can still be a truck/bus driver. How glamorous.

The Quest

So I glazed over the CDL Handbook for a few days and went and took the test. It's a bunch of common sense questions, and it can't possibly be that hard. Right? Nah, not right. I hadn't taken the test in nearly four years, and I didn't take the preparation seriously. So in my infinite wisdom, I managed to fail not one, not two, but all three tests. So here I am, sitting in a cafe, reading the CDL Handbook cover to cover. Okay, maybe not cover to cover, but definitely at least all of the relevant chapters.

But seriously, why even bother?

Aside from the aforementioned cost, having a CDL also makes owning a huge box truck less suspicious. To people who aren't quite so knowledgeable about what you can and can't drive with a regular license, it doesn't seem so outlandish to say that I do some freelance furniture moving, and I need the Commercial Driver's License to operate my freelance side business legitimately. Because otherwise, why wouldn't I just buy a Prius like a normal Californian (or a Tesla, like a normal Californian software engineer).

That's still a pretty poor reason to go through all this trouble. I don't actually have a legitimate reason, I just enjoy reserving the right to drive large, hulking vehicles. And come tomorrow morning at 8:15 AM, we'll find out if that's a right that I deserve to reserve.

Every so often, I like to apply a simple Litmus test to my life to help me figure out a couple things. The test has a single question, and the way I answer this question tells me a lot about how reasonable of a person I'm being, and if I'm living in a sustainable way. The questions is this:

If everyone acted the way I'm acting, would it still work?

It's a simple enough question, and easy enough to apply to every day life. Next time you're on the highway, ask: If everyone drove the way I'm driving right now, would that be safe? Or maybe the next time you're in the office, check: If everyone put in the same level of effort I'm putting in right now, would the company be better or worse off? It's a simple enough question to be broadly applicable and easy to fit to any situation. I wanted to apply this question to my situation, and I phrased it as follows:

Would it be possible for everyone to live the way that I'm living right now?

I don't think this one has an easy answer. Or rather, I think the answer is clear, but it depends on the perspective you're looking at it from. So I'm going to play a bit of Devil's advocate, and answer my question.

Hell No.

I can hardly imagine what the parking lots would look like if everyone at my company lived in them. They would be packed, there'd be no room for everyone, and the traffic would be completely unbearable. And forget about using the gyms and showers in the morning or at night, there'd consistently be lines out the doors, and the facilities would quickly become gross and worn. Not to mention that dinner is only open at a few cafes on campus, and the lines are bad enough as it is. If everyone was trying to eat all their meals here, the company would have to shutdown the perks all together. If everyone was doing what I'm doing right now, everything would devolve into chaos, and it would happen pretty quickly.

Totally!

In a more general sense, experimentation with "decentralizing" the home is not a new concept. A good example of this is the Capsule hotel, which is a type of hotel in Japan where you sleep in one of hundreds of small pods, and have access to a communal bathroom. This is basically what I'm doing, except instead of a pod, I have a box truck, and the "communal bathrooms" are at my workplace. If we ditch the European value of loving to have ownership over things, particularly land, this is a pretty efficient way to go about things. If everyone's homes were just glorified sleep pods and small storage areas, we'd save an enormous amount of land, energy, water, and pretty much every other resource that we consume. Something mankind has derived countless times in the course of engineering the world is that it's always more efficient to do something big and in bulk. Freight shipping is more fuel efficient, giant gas-powered turbines run more efficiently than cars, and having large communal facilities is more efficient than every individual having their own. Granted, I'm not addressing issues of food or leisure, but in this weird thought-experiment, those can remain basically the same as they are now. The point is that, if we had always organized our lives around small sleeping quarters and large communal services, we'd be dealing with far fewer sustainability issues than we are today. So in this sense, the answer is yes, it is totally possibly for everyone to live how I'm living right now.

Before you get too worried, the title probably isn't what you think it is.

I've heard some strange sounds at night, things that sound vaguely like dirt bikes, drones, jackhammers, fireworks, people playing Pac-Man, you name it: if it's unidentifiable and doesn't belong in a parking lot, I've probably heard it from the back of this box. But there has been one sound I've heard on several occasions, usually in the morning on weekends, that until recently, has been totally baffling to me.

The Sound

I can't remember when I first heard it, but in my groggy, half-awake state, I thought it was someone typing up a citation for me. Now, this doesn't make much sense in retrospect, but it sounded like someone typing loudly on a keyboard. When I say loudly, I mean I legitimately imagined someone outside my truck with an old mechanical typewriter, slamming away at keys and watching the tiny hammers force ink onto paper. And to my hazy, early morning mind, this meant that someone was typing up my license plate, prepared to give me a ticket freshly printed from their antique typewriter. Stranger still, in between these loud keystrokes, I'd hear softer pecks, as if they were more gingerly hitting some keys, though less frequently than others. It wasn't until a Sunday morning, when I woke up and had the chance to listen to it for a while, that I figured out what it was.

Birds.

More specifically, crows. The sound I was hearing was them hopping along the roof of the box, their claws scraping against the metal roof. They must be pretty large, because they produce some thunderous thuds as they plop their way across. The "softer pecks" that I was hearing were actual pecking sounds, on one specific part of the roof.

The Hole

Pictured above, the hole is a home improvement project I'm not quite sure how to tackle yet. It's some old damage, probably from someone bumping the truck into a structure that didn't quite fit the 11' clearance requirement. It's been covered up out the outside with duct tape, and on the inside with what looks like a protective spray coating. In the morning, a single beam of light shines through an exposed hole. Not a big deal in my book because, one, it never rains here, and two, I like to think of it as a tiny skylight. But for some reason, whether it's the tape or the coating, the crows just love to peck at it. Regardless of where they initially land on the roof, they always trot on over to this one corner, which is right above my head, and they peck at it until they're sufficiently satisfied they've banged their faces against it enough times and that they've succeeded in waking me up.

No complaints on my end, I'm more than happy to have Nature's alarm clock at my disposal, and anyone who's ever listened to raindrops rhythmically landing on a car roof knows just how relaxing it can be.

As you may or may not have noticed, I've been slowly rolling out new functionality to the site. What I've added so far:

Box Badges

Some posts have a little black box truck icon to the right of the title, which means that I was writing the post from inside the box. Since the blog is called "From Inside the Box", it'd be disingenuous of me not to say whether or not I was actually in there while I was writing. This post, for example, was not written from within the box, but rather a quaint little cafe in downtown Mountain View.

Search

If you're looking for a particular post, there's now a search box below the "About" section. Type in your search term and hit "Enter", and I'll the site will do my its darnedest to find the posts that you're looking for.

From the Top

If you're just coming on board with all of this, and you're really into Shadenfreude, then clicking the "Beginning" button at the top will list the posts from earliest to latest, so you can read up on the hot mess that constituted my first week or two, and get caught up with how I got here.

Post List

Similar to search, if you want to see all of the posts in one place, there's an "Index" button at the top that has a chronological list of all the currently available posts.

I've been thinking about adding comments and a few other features, but if you have any requests in the meantime, feel free to let me know!

My parking situation is very much analogous to my housing situation: I don't quite fit in. One of the most difficult parts of my situation, one that I underestimated during the planning process, is trying to fit the silly thing in parking lots.

Imagine this. It's Saturday morning, and you'd like to run some errands. No big deal right, just hop in the car and go do them. Think again. There are two ways your scenario can play out.

Scenario #1: You're going to the Mall

Sweet, we're going to the mall, a huge outdoor complex, parking should be a breeze, right? Still wrong. If it's even mildly busy, you're going to be constantly within inches of a multi-car insurance claim, and don't expect any other car on the road to understand that your vehicle doesn't maneuver as tightly as their Prius does. They'll pull right up to your front bumper as you're in the middle of a very tight right turn, and then look mortified as you play a game of Operation/horizontal Limbo that would make your childhood self envious. Not to mention the cases where backing up in the middle of a four way intersection becomes necessary. You've never seen fear until you've looked into a soccer mom's anxious eyes as you back your wrought iron tailgate nanometers away from her prized RAV4.

Scenario #2: You're not going to the Mall

So you're going to a small store, like a GNC or an Autozone. How do you know where to park when you get there? You don't fit in any old spot. If you're lucky, the spots might be a little longer than usual and you can back your tail end a few feet over the curb. That is if there aren't any poles, street lamps, or sprinklers, and if the curb is low enough that you don't bounce it off the gas tank. Otherwise, you have to hope that the lot is designed so that it butts two parking spots up against each other without any curbs, medians, or trees between them, because then you can just park and take up the entirety of two spots. Oh, and be on the lookout for low hanging branches while you're doing on this, or one of them might get caught in the sheathing on top of the box and rip the whole thing open. My strategy for not destroying my house has been to look up the area on Google Maps ahead of time, scope out a good location, and then hope nothing goes horribly wrong in the actual execution of the plan.

I did quite a bit of internal debating over whether or not the 16' box would be too cumbersome. In the end, I'm glad I have all of the extra space (compared to, say, a 10' box), but if you're even thinking of doing something similar, make sure you're completely comfortable maneuvering large vehicles. I drove 40' buses in college, and I never thought that knowledge would be so incredibly necessary for my future life as a software engineer. Life's funny that way.