How to Deal with the Homeless

Living in San Francisco, homelessness is not just a problem you read about. Every day on my way to work I come face to face with dozens of people living on the street who ask me for help. It's made me think a lot about the way society treats the homeless and what I should do when I'm approached for money. I've been doing some research and have come up with a few simple strategies I thought I'd share.

Human Shield: If you're lucky enough to be walking close to someone, position yourself so that they're in-between you and the bum. It's now their problem to deal with. Once in position, keep your eye on the shield. A clever shield will sometimes pull a counter maneuver on you, abruptly slowing down and veering away when you reach the bum, leaving you in the line of fire.

Cell phone force field: If you're talking on the phone you are surrounded by an invisible force field that allows you to completely block out the world. It would be rude of you to not give the person you're on the phone with your undivided attention, and even ruder for a stranger to try to interrupt you.

1,000 yard stare: You take on the vacant stare of a veteran traumatized by combat. You're too busy looking in the distance for insurgents to notice the spanger.

Confrontation: If you see the same bums everyday this might be the best solution of all. I've not tried it myself but my friend Keri at the breakfast place I go to every morning swears by it. Just walk up and give the bum a piece of your mind. "Look, I work too hard for my money to just give it away to lazy bums. Get a job!". While this may be difficult for some of you to do, consider it a long term investment. Instead of having to deal with the same person every single day you only have to deal with them once.

The crazy: Being crazy sucks, but one side benefit is that people tend to leave you alone. As you approach the bum, he'll be thinking of a way to start a conversation. Beat him to the punch and start one with yourself first. My friend Mac is a master of this technique. I think it's because it allows him to let out some of the crazy he keeps bottled up inside while performing his duties as a sane person.

Primetime of Your Life

One of the dangers associated with my job as a technical analyst is that I feel compelled to graph things that probably shouldn't be graphed. Last month when I turned 28 and rounded up to thirty, I got into a conversation with a coworker about quality of life. I said that my quality of life has been increasing every year and that I didn't see any signs that that would change. "So you're on a linear upward trajectory huh?" asked the coworker. "Not so much linear" I said, reaching for the white board marker. And thus began my meditation on quality of life as represented by a one-dimensional curve. Ironically, right after drawing and labeling the axes - quality of life (QOL) vs. Years - I got busy with work and didn't have time to plot my quality of life. The next morning however, I walked into my cube to find that someone had plotted it for me, with a series of large blue dots. The dots presented a rather grim scenario, starting very high in early childhood and dropping steadily through the years, reaching near zero at fifty, and then slowly coming back up in the seventies and eighties. Who could've done this? Most of the people I work with are at least ten years older than I am, so whoever it was wasn't exactly psyched to be on the planet. Or maybe they were plotting my quality of life? Naw. My coworker and I speculated as to who it might be but produced no good guesses.

Figure 1. Quality of Life (QOL) vs. Years

Several days passed and still I hadn't found time to plot my quality of life. Every time I turned around in my chair the dots would stare accusingly at me, predicting my quality of life if I didn't take time out to examine it. Is that what happened to the person who plotted them?

One by one everyone in the office stopped by my cube and asked me about the dots, including presumably the person who plotted them. I would jokingly explain to them my little project and tell them I had no idea who'd drawn the dots. My boss jokingly said he was on a linear upward trajectory and drew a straight blue line that crisscrossed the downward sloping blue dots. The next morning I found a much more thought out line drawn in black. It showed a peak at 21 (the most commonly cited peak of life), followed by a rugged plateau that began sloping down after fifty. The morning after that another new plot appeared, the grimmest one yet. In dark red there were two square peaks, the last of which ended with a vertical drop to zero around age 38. Damn. They'll probably make me erase this the next time someone comes in for an interview.

But today I finally did it! I plotted my QOL in bright lime green. You can see a happy childhood, followed by a significant drop during adolescence that continues until age 18, followed by a near linear increase through my twenties. The little blip in my late twenties would be this year. It started out with the excitement of moving to a new amazing city and starting my first real job and has taken a down turn because its been really hard meeting new people and I get lonely too often. I'm optimistic though. There's so much potential out there I can taste it, and I feel like I'm finally figuring out how to realize it. Now it's just a matter of buckling down and climbing that incline. Maybe I should start working out ....