I’m pretty sure that he’s not actually homeless, but honestly there is reason for me to joke about making this claim. But I work with a guy that if he weren’t such a blabbermouth at times talking about his living situation, there would likely be legitimate reason to believe that he might actually be homeless.
It’s not uncommon for people who work in offices to bring a sweatshirt, a hoodie, or some sort of house coat to wear while in an office environment, because everyone’s temperature gauge is different, but there can typically only be one temperature for an office. That being said, Mr. Homeless in my office has this sweatshirt that he hasn’t taken off since his second day of starting here. I wish I were kidding too; the day he was introduced into the office, he was wearing a typically office-complaint dress shirt, but I guess it was decided that the office was far too cold for his internal thermometer, and the sweatshirt was brought in and there hasn’t been a single minute since that I had no seen him in it since.
I’m really curious to see what happens once the weather warms up, and it gets to a point where a sweatshirt isn’t going to be necessary. It’s hard to tell because the sweatshirt obscures 95% of whatever he’s wearing underneath, but I get the impression that he has less than five collared shirts that he cycles through, and capitalizes fully on the fact that the sweatshirt hides them.
The same goes for his pants. I’ve only noticed that he only wears two different pairs of pants. One is khaki colored, the other brown; both are cargo. He’s probably somewhere around early 60’s in age.
But the real kicker is the fact that regularly, he works way more hours than just about anyone else. I get to the office fairly early on a regular basis, but on a regular basis, Mr. Homeless is here before I am. I have literally seen him actually leave the office once. Otherwise, every single day, he’s still at his machine when I’m packing up and heading out the door. No, he’s not the InDesign wizard that I am, but I know with certainty that his workload is typically less than my own, so it’s hard to imagine that he still has work to do in the same work hours that I accomplish everything I’m tasked with. Sure, I’ve seen him surfing the web as just about everyone here does during downtime, but I can’t imagine staying past 5:00 p.m. here on any given day when half the office walks out the door at anywhere from 3:45 – 4:30.
Based on the information above, it really does sound like he lives in the office and does not actually have a place of residence. Sure, it raises the questions about his hygiene, but he wasn’t exactly the bastion of dapper the day he arrived either.
As fun as it is to imagine actually having a homeless co-worker, I know he really isn’t, however. There are times during the day when he eavesdrops on enough conversations, to where he’ll eventually hop up onto a soapbox, and begin blathering for 15 minutes. He’s a nice enough guy, but man does he find ways to inject himself as the subject matter, and then it only becomes a matter of time before it’s about his ex-wife or military service.
And more than once has the subject of his supposed home and the mortgage he’s aggressively attacking come up, which concludes with the confirmation that he supposedly does indeed have a place of residence somewhere. But at the same time, I’m led to speculate that in his attempts to aggressively rid himself of his mortgage, he’s probably also living to the extreme when it comes to cutting corners everywhere else. I’m guessing he probably rarely uses any utilities, he’s clearly not buying any clothing, and the self-imposed longer hours are probably his attempt to stay at a place where the temperature is regulated, the internet is included, and when he arrives and leaves at odd hours, he’s also avoiding traffic, and conserving fuel.
Regardless, none of the above mentioned facts really help his case in possibly believing that he’s homeless.
Ironically, this is not the first time I’ve suspected someone I’ve worked with being homeless. When I was still living in Virginia, one of the proofreaders at the print shop I worked at I thought could possibly have been homeless. She had a Ford Fiesta that was packed to the gills with personal effects which leads to the theory that she might be living out of her car. But now that I think about it, and having seen so many episodes of Animal Hoarders, it’s probably to safer to assume that she was “just” an animal hoarder whose actual home was probably overrun by fucking cats, because there was no denying the fact that she literally smelled like piss all the time. And her car was the only safe haven for her personal effects while her house was probably a decaying plot of land reeking of fucking cat piss.
