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A stranger secretly lived in my home
- blamazon 5y agoWeirdly wholesome story, despite the dark undercurrent. Those of a certain faith may argue the stranger was an angel.
- georgewsinger 5y agoThis read like it could have been a chapter out of a Stephen King novel, until the stranger saved the puppy: > I got a puppy. While she was being toilet-trained, I kept her in the bathroom. One day, when I was out, the apartment flooded. I came home to find the puppy in the sink. She was tiny. I didn’t know how she could have got up there unless someone had put her there to save her.
- pen2l 5y agoI visited SanFran a couple of years ago, and this reminded me of a homeless guy, in his late 60s I imagine, that I saw at a fast food chain. So I was I think at in-and-out, and a homeless guy was going through the garbage bin to find food. When I came over to dump my stuff in the bin, he was immediately considerate and stepped aside so I could dump the covers and napkins, whilst making sibilant sounds and keeping his gaze down in a strangely submissive manner. And then the staff came over and tried to make him leave the place. I recall he said no actual word but put a mild challenge with more sibilant sounds but eventually left. And I remember thinking, well, he smelled and I tried to avoid physical contact, but was there really a need to make him leave, and take away what small dignity the world had assigned him? Clearly mentally off, I don't know, but trying to survive in the way that he can. But I find myself thinking again what I thought then -- there, but for the grace of god go I
- yann2 5y agoOfftopic but I feel I must add, sibilant sounds are an effective way to get boring meetings to end quick.
- mc32 5y agoThey are also tropes in old movies and cartoons when someone wants to pretend “there is nothing to see here, I’m just whistling in the wind… minding my own business” maybe throw in some foot shuffling.
- throw1234651234 5y agoPro-tip on charity - see someone eating out of the trash? They could probably actually use your money. Much more effective than giving it to panhandlers.
- pbourke 5y agoOr at least a meal from the restaurant.
- throw1234651234 5y agoYea, there is that aspect of it. Ideally, I will go buy them a meal, so they can't use the money for other things. I personally don't indulge in "other things", but I don't know how concerned I am about them using the money for that either. I think it's very, very difficult for someone digging through trash to get their life together, so if they indulge, they indulge. Note that it's not a comment on their character or anything of the sort, just the sheer number of things needed to re-adjust in society from zero, with zero real help. Another point is that in most countries outside of the US, panhandlers are either "working for themselves" and make decent money, perhaps better than at a low-end job while having proper living arrangements, etc (and thus "rob" the true poor from the donation). It can also be worse, with situations where panhandlers are actually curated by an organizer who pays them a salary and takes a profit. The latter schemes are also mixed up in exploitation. Now that I type it all out, I am realizing that buying a meal also prevents the second scenario too. Good stuff.
- WarOnPrivacy 5y agoI had a guy ask for $5 to buy cigarettes and beer. I gave it to him. Too often, I can't buy honesty at any price.
- ipaddr 5y agoFrom a logical point of view from a resource management perspective you giving them money is better and allows them to get more bang from that gift. You buy a McD combo drop it off and feel good. They have to eat it right away. There stomach will not be able to handle it all. They cannot save split the food. If you give them money they could still dumpster dive for food, keep the money and buy other things they need like (maxi pads, or 1 food bar every morning for a week or a stamp to mail someone or quarters to make a call). They can buy a smaller meal or food in a form that will allow them to space it out over time. Most importantly they can buy the type of food that works best from them. 5 dollars could have multiplier effect. A pre-purchased fast food meal will leaving the homeless person craving for days. The homeless are drinking/doing drugs less than homed people drinking/doing drugs because they don't have the resources. I would be concerned with salaried beggers.
- kelp 5y agoLiving in one of the worse parts of San Francisco, for the past few years (west SOMA), I can say that people going through your trash is quite a nuisance. You'll put your trash out for pickup day, and a significant portion of the time, someone will come and go through it. And often as they are going through it, they will just throw random things on the ground. So our little side street kind of has a constant layer of trash. The city does employ people to come through and pick it up, and they do that regularly, but they would have to do it daily to really keep the street clean. I think they come more like weekly. Tangentially, I was walking my dog this morning, and had to ensure she didn't step on the used hypodermic needle on the sidewalk. Nothing covering the needle. This happens all the time. Right now they are at least 3 tents on my small side street block. For businesses, like if you were at an In-n-out you must have been at Fishermans wharf, that's the only one in SF. They regularly have to ask people to leave who are acting in various disruptive ways, and bothering their customers. A few years back, I was sitting at a bar in SF, that had outdoor tables. I think I was on a first (and only) date. I guy walked up, took my dates glass of white wine, drank the whole thing down, and then said "I'm an alcoholic". And then just stood there looking at us. (Also as someone who's lived in San Francisco for years, I just can't help but be triggered when someone says San Fran.)
- throw1234651234 5y agoYeaaaa, but you guys have SEALS and electric skooters that tell you where the bad areas of the city are (where you can't leave your scoot). It's good times all around. And that windy road thingy.
- lisper 5y ago> people going through your trash is quite a nuisance. Sure, but who is ultimately responsible for this, the people going through the trash, or the people who have structured our society in such a way that there are people who think their best option in life is to scavenge other people's trash? Because I'm pretty sure that the people going through the trash would stop in an instant if they were offered a better alternative.
- noasaservice 5y ago
- lisper 5y ago> there, but for the grace of god go I You might be interested in this: https://graceofgodmovie.com/ https://graceofgodmovie.com/ [Disclosure: that is my movie.]
- SmkyMt 5y agoI look forward to viewing it this evening. And FWIW: It could motivate me to _buy_ ($20) rather than _rent ($4) [from Amazon] if I knew the respective portions that go to (your) production company rather than just to Amazon.
- julianh95 5y ago+1 on this. I’d much rather spend more money if I knew it directly supported the creator/maker/etc. I often do this with my purchases where I look for their direct website and purchase from there.
- lisper 5y agoYes, I get a cut of every sale and rental, thought I don't recall exactly how much. It's a very small income stream and I don't really need the money. So much as I appreciate the gesture, you should feel free to rent. Frankly, a good review is worth much more to me than a sale.
- elcano 5y agoI would assume that you would have to very mentally stable to resist all that humiliation without going nuts. I have a friend that wasn't homeless, but all unemployment money was used on rent required to keep his shared custody (without an apartment to house the kids, you cannot have custody). He always was clean and used good clothes, but he made the line with homeless people to get free food daily. Otherwise he wouldn't have money to eat. He said that the worst part of all was the look from voluntary women that were working on the food delivery organization. Each woman reacts differently to men. But he says that this is completely different. The look is like if he wasn't even a man - it's like they are feeding a lesser species. He says that he have never experienced the same reaction from women in other contexts, and that it hurts. It steals away all feeling of manliness. Luckily he got out of that situation many years ago.
- cgio 5y agoThis is a very interesting observation but also one that could support a few different interpretations. Is it that women enjoy at last a social circumstance where they are superior to men? Or is it men realising the brunt of their experience and the extent of their fall when receiving help from women? I would think it’s mostly the latter, given the volunteer women or men I know all have dedicated significant part of their lives to helping people, not men or women or children or elders specifically.
- leppr 5y ago> He always was clean and used good clothes An alternative explanation could be that the women thought he was abusing the service to get free food even if he didn't need it, and thus put on some faces that he misinterpreted.
- rkk3 5y ago> I remember thinking, well, he smelled and I tried to avoid physical contact, but was there really a need to make him leave A homeless person was going through the garbage in the middle of a fast food restaurant... yeah, I assume that would be off-putting to customers & detrimental to their business.
- sushid 5y agoYeah I really don't understand this line of thinking. I imagine most would sheepishly agree that they would also do the same thing if it were their restaurant.
- bshimmin 5y agoIf you have nothing better to do, many of the "Experience" series in The Guardian are a fun read: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/series/experience https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/series/experience
- Zababa 5y agoI like how honest the titles are, especially with the "Experience: " before everything.
- bserge 5y agoWasn't there a similar story in Japan? Also multiple stories of people secretly living in office building and warehouses. Gotta make do, I guess.
- tompazourek 5y agoThe critically acclaimed South Korean movie "Parasite" has a story like that.
- guyomes 5y agoAnother recommended Korean movie with a story like that is "3-iron". It has a more poetic approach.
- TigeriusKirk 5y agoAt one company I worked for, a new hire started living on a floor under construction in the building. He thought no one knew, but we all did. Stayed up there for months since management was afraid of confronting him about it for some reason. He did do good work, I guess.
- newsbinator 5y agoHow did everybody know? What gave it away?
- loa_in_ 5y agoFor months, every day?
- TigeriusKirk 5y agoYep, for months it was where he lived. People suspected something odd when they saw him long after he'd "gone home for the day." Someone eventually went up to the floor under renovation (it was bare concrete and steel) and found his stuff. No one ever said anything to him that I'm aware of, but everyone (in our division anyway) knew he was up there. He eventually got an apartment, and I ran into him in that neighborhood so we knew he was really out. I'm not sure what his situation was, we were all quite well paid by local standards.
- spoonjim 5y agoThis story was covered in a more riveting way on a podcast I once heard, but I can’t remember the name of it.
- eth0up 5y agoMotion - Never leave home without it * https://motion-project.github.io/ https://motion-project.github.io/ Several options I use are: 1. Simply upload images/vids to server, cloud etc. 2. Write images to external drive in mounted safe, if offline. I've a script to initiate it with nohup, then activate physlock. This helps protect the data. A fantastic and less caveman implementation is described by this HN comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24587745 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24587745 No Amazon politics[1] and minimal data vulnerability. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21346307 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21346307
- niffydroid 5y agoThe worst part of the story for me was the puppy. I couldn't care about her, but poor puppy
- nightfly 5y agoWhat's poor about the puppy here? It sounds like when something bad happened this person helped keep the puppy safe
- tarun_anand 5y agoHow did this comment make to the top of HN? The quality is deteriorating...
- melenaboija 5y agoThis works with votes and flags, the more votes a post or comment of people visiting HN the higher it gets, inverse to flags and some other factors but you will find more detail here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html About quality I guess is subjective but I would say there are two options here: - use the voting system to accommodate it to your quality standards - don't visit the page
- bjelkeman-again 5y agoAlso weekends have had a quite long tradition of having more general interest subjects posted.
- tarun_anand 5y agoNot noticed it but as I said we always have the option to look elsewhere for "hacker" news
- Jcowell 5y agoYes but we don’t always have the option to see hacker news discussion. I personally invite to see HN’s viewpoints on non-“hacker” topics.
- WarOnPrivacy 5y agoAgreed. I like that it feels like days off.
- tarun_anand 5y agoYes I guess not the place for "hacker" news anymore...
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- whirlingdervish 5y agoA couple years ago one of the devs I work with came in to the office very early for some reason and discovered a man sleeping in one of the conference rooms. After the fact we discovered that an emergency exit door wasn’t locking properly. He didn’t take anything even though he could have easily made off with tens of thousands of dollars of electronics. He just needed somewhere to sleep.
- stevezsa8 5y agoYour office got off lucky. We had a guy walk into our office behind employees. No one challenged the trespasser... he walked off with a stack of laptops.
- Scarblac 5y agoAs a teenager I worked in a large logistics center for supermarkets. Usually we would fill trucks that brought the supplies to the supermarkets, but rarely they had ran out of something small and would come to us with a van or so. So one day two guys drive up with a van, park it at a loading dock, go into the warehouse and start loading the van with coffee. They even got help from some workers. Turns out they weren't related to any customers at all, they just stole a van full of coffee. Which wouldn't be worth a story... But two weeks later, the same guys did the exact same thing again, at the same logistics center. Successfully, again. That takes some nerve.
- AussieWog93 5y ago>So one day two guys drive up with a van, park it at a loading dock, go into the warehouse and start loading the van with coffee. They even got help from some workers. Reminds me of that scene from Trailer Park Boys https://youtu.be/8d-bM-Whsmk https://youtu.be/8d-bM-Whsmk
- jacquesm 5y agoA story from the RAI congress center in Amsterdam has it that someone purposefully scratched a 911 on the Porsche display, cue a car transporter that shows up the next morning with a big logo on the side that gets help from the staff to remove the 'damaged 911' so that it can be replaced with another. They never found either the car or the guys. This was before CCTV was common, but still, a couple of hundred people must have seen the whole thing and absolutely nobody thought anything strange was going on.
- bob229 5y agothe guardian is trash, it’s amazing anyone reads it. Stop sharing it
- davidwritesbugs 5y agoMany many years ago I got kicked out of student halls at university. I used to keep my stuff in my lockers and sleep in the bathing rooms all night. If people tried to use one I'd yell "In the bath". One time I slept in a student lounge behind some sofas and very late a couple came in and made out, and I remained as still as I could. As they left the girl said "I could swear there was someone else in there" haha.
- tomcooks 5y agoWhen I was cycling between Lisbon wnd Istanbul I made sure to either sleep far from view or to be as obnoxiously visible as possible (calling the local municipality, cleaning around campsite, knocking doors of farms nearby) precisely to avoid scaring people. I was lucky enough to do my homelessness as a choice, I can only imagine how many persons do this in city environments ourbof need of a shelter.
- elcano 5y ago‘The Secret Apartment’ is the story of a Vietnam vet who claims to have lived in Veterans Stadium for years https://www.inquirer.com/news/the-secret-apartment-vet-stadium-20210309.html https://www.inquirer.com/news/the-secret-apartment-vet-stadi...
- rubinlinux 5y agoThis reminded me of my aunt, who recently expressed concerns like this. Someone uses my toothpaste, "I just bought this tube a few weeks ago and it is almost empty" for example. And similar with ice cream etc. Thing is, it was her. She has recently been committed to a facility with Alzheimer's. At certain times, as the disease drifts in and out, she is quite present and sane, and cannot explain to herself the lost time any other way.
- trevcanhuman 5y agoHave a similar situation at the moment. My grandmother has dementia and pretty much doesn't know where to go or what to do anymore. Is on meds almost all the time. Today she went like 6 times to the bathroom in an hour and this happened like for 3 - 4 hrs. I don't know if this is psychological / or from the brain or an actual urinary infection. I guess it's hard to find out this kind of stuff when she's on meds all the time. Interestingly, my grandfather is perfectly fine (she's like 79, he's 90 !). He's starting to have a bad eye but apart from that still goes out and about. Of course, his heart is sort of more tired now but he can still drive, walk around, go buy stuff. But my grandma can't, I can see in her eyes that she can't really recognize me or usually only recognizes her husband, unfortunately. Also, I had a grandfather who lost his life due to alzheimers, although I didn't really spend much time with him, or at least do not remember it but he was a veterinarian and died of relatively young age ( ~ 66 y). My theory for the cause of dementia for my grandma is that she stopped doing and having interactions with her friends and family. As we grew older, we stopped coming to their house, having dinner, having birthdays, family got more dispersed and she hasn't done much about it; the fact is, it's been only about a year and a half since the dementia first started (she was very functional like 2 years ago), probably the pandemic blew the fuse... She used to do all kinds of things back in the day. She coordinated exchange programs between my city and a sister city in the U.S. for students to learn the culture, language and study there. Also, she doesn't really have any friends afaik, just sometimes talks to her family but otherwise, has lost connections; while my grandfather, still looks for real estate to buy, things to do, art to buy/sell, etc. Still talks to some friends out and about.
- knbknb 5y agoIn 2009 there was a Finnish woman who lived inside the buildings of the Berlin Tegel airport, for several months. She was mentally disturbed. https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/escape-to-berlin-finnish-woman-lived-at-the-airport-for-two-months-a-612934.html https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/escape-to-berli...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jacquesm 5y agoI had a tacit agreement with a homeless guy I discovered one day sleeping in my car. I'll keep the doors unlocked and you don't mess it up and by 7 am you're gone. He was by far the best tenant I ever had, we did this for close to two years and then I moved. The area where I lived was an older industrial zone in the East of Amsterdam, there wasn't a whole lot around there other than a salvation army post and I figured he liked the backseat of my Citroen DS better than the cots and 4-to-a-room arrangement that they had there.
- pottertheotter 5y agoThat's so compassionate of you. I don't know that I would think of doing that.
- jacquesm 5y agoWell, if you take into consideration how crappy the locks are on those old cars then maybe I had a very cheap security guard ;) He really was a nice old man and super embarrassed about the whole thing. The funniest bit about this is how I discovered he did this, one day I got up too early thinking I was late, rushed out and drove off without my usual morning routine and when I heard a voice behind me asking if he could please get out of the car, my heart nearly stopped :)
- itwy 5y agoThat's hilarious. How did the rest of the conversation go?
- jacquesm 5y agoI just dropped him off at the nearest light. He would leave a small bag in the car from then on so he didn't have to lug all his stuff around. This was around 1989, the location is Veemarkt in Amsterdam ('Veemarkt' is dutch for cattle market). Back then homeless people in Amsterdam were fairly rare, now there are 100's of them.
- ajb 5y agoThere was the guy who dug a secret underground bunker under Hampstead heath: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2020/mar/05/invisible-city-how-homeless-man-built-life-underground-bunker-hampstead-heath https://www.theguardian.com/news/2020/mar/05/invisible-city-...
- petre 5y agoThis article's introduction sounds a bit like the intro to Dickens' Bleak House. Quite a bit of literature. The nasty thing is they threw the guy in jail because they found an improvised firearm with his DNA on buried it near some of his stuff.
- aasasd 5y agoThere was also a story about an elder woman living in closets or even a cupboard in a home of some family, for over a year iirc. This is it I think: https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna24889337 https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna24889337 Turns out that one can easily find more than one such story, DDG even helpfully suggests the remaining keywords.
- Kenji 5y agoHow the fuck would you just live for months while things are disappearing. This woman is mental.
- pacaro 5y agoIt's a relief to read an article about Enumclaw that doesn't mention horses
- francilien 5y agoReminds me of Otto: https://overcast.fm/+U0D9gsAl8 https://overcast.fm/+U0D9gsAl8