14 DAY TRIAL // It’s been long-time known that the Google campus is thought in such a way that employees would want to spend as much time there as possible, in a way that doing overtime doesn’t seem like such a chore. Little did Google know that some people would find a way to actually live on campus.
While such behavior is actually discouraged at Google, there have been plenty of cases when people have more or less spent all their time at their workplace to avoid paying rent.
Over on Quora, people are sharing experiences, whether their own or their friends’, and it seems that it’s quite a common thing to do.
One member states that there was a guy who had a camper parked in the parking lot near the headquarters and he slept there and did everything else in the office. That meant he showered at the gym, did his laundry on campus and ate every meal he could on campus. This tactic paid off, apparently, since after two or three years he had saved up enough money to buy a house.
Google, as you may know, offers employees free meals and snacks, resting places, entertainment areas, massages and gyms, as well as many other perks.
Another Quora user, who used to work at Google said that for three months he lived in a Volvo station wagon in the parking garage below one of the company’s buildings. “I set up a twin mattress from IKEA and put up black curtains (on the 90% blacked out windows) and slept there mostly every night for three months until I moved in with my buddy (an ex Googler) in the Mission in San Francisco,” he says.
Google seems to be used to employees living in their cars
Another former Googler says he spent 13 months on campus. He had a house payment to make and alimony to pay, which left him with no money for renting a place in South Bay. So, he bought a 1990 GMC Vandura for $1,800, twin mattresses and curtains from IKEA and slept in the car for over a year before moving in San Francisco.
While it may not exactly be in line with the rules, living on campus isn’t against the policy either. “Google Security came by very early on, but once they determined that the guy in the mysteriously parked white van was just an eccentric Googler and not the Unabomber, they never came by again,” Ben Discoe, UI programmer, explains.
Another anonymous user said that he’d been living on the Google campus since December 2011 and that he continued to work for the company and live in the same conditions.
While this may all seem a bit amusing, the truth is that we live in a world where workaholism is taking over and Google’s offices are the perfect grounds for this to happen.