This is the story of a man known only as Brandon, a software engineer at Google who is unlike any of his colleagues.
Why, you ask? Well, Brandon doesn’t live in a plush San Francisco apartment like the majority of the people he shares a campus building with every day. Nope, instead, he lives in 128-square-foot truck in Google HQ’s Bay Area car park.
As reported by Business Insider, the 23-year-old – who withheld his identity to maintain his privacy – decided to leave the very minimal $2000-per-month (£1,295) corporate housing he was sharing with three other interns, as he was never there.
So, with that in mind, he decided to move a lot closer to work when he finally became a full-time employee. Speaking with BI, he said: “I realised I was paying an exorbitant amount of money for the apartment I was staying in — and I was almost never home. It’s really hard to justify throwing that kind of money away. You’re essentially burning it — you’re not putting equity in anything and you’re not building it up for a future — and that was really hard for me to reconcile.”
Not long after thinking up his master plan, Brandon splashed a cool $10,000 of his signing-on bonus on a decent sized truck and made his way to San Francisco to begin full-time employment with Google.
His only outgoings come in the form of one £121-per-month van insurance charge. He has no electric costs, his phone is paid for by Google, and he showers daily on-site after a workout in their campus gym. Oh, and he eats breakfast, lunch, and dinner there – for free. Cushy.