The Feeling of a Crash
A company keeps turning even after someone leaves.
Some people like to think the whole place would seize up without them. Look a little closer, though, and it almost never works out that way.
The facilities team's work, even with Assistant Manager Park gone, was the same as any other day.
"Assistant Manager Chae, handle this too."
"Yes, sir."
Today, same as always, the department head set another stack of extra work on my desk and walked off.
Ha... I knew it. That ache creeping up the back of my skull all morning—more work piled on.
I set the papers down where they belonged and watched his back as he returned to his seat. The department head was, how to put it, a man whose standards sat too high. A classic elite, taking it for granted that everyone else could work at his level.
You do learn a lot under someone like that, though...
That he'd made department head at his age was proof enough of how exceptional he was. The youngest department head in the company—and maybe the very reason the facilities team never grew. He finished every job himself, so the people upstairs decided the current headcount was plenty, and no new hire ever arrived to share the load.
That was one thing. Being worn out was another.
I grumbled only on the inside, the way I always did, and started for the floor.
Unless I meant to quit and retire early the way Assistant Manager Park had, a man living on a salary had to work if he wanted to eat.
"Okay, check..."
"Cough! Cough!"
"Yikes."
I moved through the site checking the air conditioners, weaving past a few older men who sounded like they'd caught colds.
Must be the winter. Half the floor's come down with something.
Once I'd looked over every spot flagged as a problem and made it back, it was already lunch.
"Oh, Assistant Manager Chae, you're back? Good work."
"Thank you, Assistant Manager Kim."
He was waiting in the office instead of going down to eat.
"Lunch?"
"What about the department head?"
Assistant Manager Kim creased his brow and went on.
"When has that man ever eaten with us? He packs a diet lunch from home every single day."
"That's true..."
The department head always ate alone, and always on a strict diet. Which was probably why he still had that body and that face at his age.
He's almost painfully by the book. He does loosen up when he's drinking, though.
We went down to the cafeteria below and opened the door, and the same rice and the same faces were there to greet us, same as every other day.
"One ramyeon, please."
"You're not getting the site meal, Assistant Manager Kim? It's spicy pork today."
I checked our names off by hand and turned back. He'd ordered ramyeon—two thousand won cheaper than the cafeteria tray.
Sad-eyed, Assistant Manager Kim said:
"Even this much, I've got to save. I need it to average down..."
"Ah..."
Right. He'd said he was stuck in a stock, hadn't he? I sat, ate for a bit, then asked the question that had suddenly come to me.
"Did you put it in Samsung Electronics?"
The moment I brought it up, the words poured out of him like a fish returned to water.
"Don't even start. This time the angle off the breakout from fifty-thousand-won Samsung, heading for eighty thousand, was a work of art—and then it dumps."
"The angle?"
He flashed a grin and held out his phone. Samsung Electronics' chart was a tangled mess of overlapping lines.
"Yeah, these are trend lines. This is expert territory—a little much for a stock newbie like you, Assistant Manager Chae. It takes all kinds of profound analysis..."
It doesn't look that impressive.
I thought so, and still nodded along earnestly beside him.
Office life. Office life.
"What? It's fine! Sure, the price dipped for a bit, but according to my analysis it's going to rip into the close today! You just hold, and it comes back up!"
...All I'm getting is that same chill.
Halfway through my spicy pork, I looked at him through the ominous air coming off that chart and went on.
"Assistant Manager Kim, why not sell, see whether it actually rises, and then get back in? I've got a bad feeling about this."
He froze. The hand that had been lifting ramyeon to his mouth with such confidence stopped cold.
"...Come on, what's going to happen? Drop this hard and the bounce the next day is huge, so not selling is the right call..."
"Well... I don't really know stocks. I'm only saying how it feels."
He sat there a long while without even eating, then spoke.
"Ha... If there's one thing I'll give you, Assistant Manager Chae, it's your instincts..."
Click. Right there in front of me, he hit sell.
"All right, Assistant Manager Chae. If it goes back up, you're covering my lunches from now on."
"Assistant Manager Kim, it's just a feeling. A feeling."
"I don't care! If I'm ruined, I'll just live on ramyeon."
What is he even saying...
I watched the bluster with a slightly cooled eye, but he was already inhaling his ramyeon and no longer looking at the trading screen.
"I'm heading up to rest a bit. I'll have a smoke, then go back in."
"Yes, sir. Thank you for the meal."
What remained of lunch was that honeyed stretch of time, the part that ought to be spent on a honeyed nap. I meant to spend it on stocks instead.
"...What? Domestic stocks mean I have to convert currency again?"
Yesterday I'd somehow signed up for automatic exchange without meaning to and turned my entire fortune into dollars, so even though I wanted the Korean market, I couldn't touch it.
Nothing for it. Convert it back and, roughly... —God!
I ran the numbers in my head and startled.
Just converting... I'd lose more than three hundred thousand won?
The buy rate and the sell rate weren't the same. Same money, and merely exchanging it would cost me half of what I'd made yesterday.
If that's how it is, I'm better off just trading U.S. stocks.
So my hand tapped the overseas tab instead of the domestic one.
Click.
"All right... which name looks good..."
I opened the app, sorted by market cap, and scrolled down the list.
Nothing's really hitting me...
Set beside Assistant Manager Kim's chart from a moment ago, the difference was obvious. Nothing on the list gave off a chill the way Samsung Electronics had.
Does the ability only work when I sell? It'd be nice if it picked what to buy, too.
Thinking back, it had always triggered at the moment I could patch a situation already on top of me and get out of it.
Just in case, I opened the whole list and scanned for names that felt chilly and names that didn't. Simply staring at a chart I hadn't bought produced no chill at all.
Right. A blue candle printed right there and the price fell, and I didn't feel a thing.
Apparently the ability only woke when I was looking at a stock I had bought, or that someone else had.
Then what I pick is going to matter...
That was when it happened.
Flash.
The office lights came on, and the honeyed lunch hour was over.
Ah! I should have slept through lunch...
I set the phone down in a hurry and, without meaning to, looked toward the department head. He was picking the grit of sleep from his eyes and yawning long and slow.
Yikes. Eye contact...
"Assistant Manager Chae."
"Yes!"
See? Wasn't the chill already back? This ability clearly made itself known only once the situation was already on me.
And so another busy afternoon on the floor went by.
Home, and my eyes were fixed on the phone as I leaned against the bed. Home, such as it was—nothing but a monthly room I'd grabbed in a hurry near the site.
The company did provide dorms, but by the time my turn came every bed was taken, so I'd had no choice but to find a place of my own.
At first the rent draining out every month had me weeping bitter tears. Once I was actually living there, though, even a scrap of time alone beat coming back from work, drinking shoulder to shoulder with the others, and then getting dragged out to another round.
Lucky there's no company dinner tonight.
I'd said my goodbyes the way I always did and was walking toward the lodging alone when a passing car's window came down and Assistant Manager Kim appeared.
"Assistant Manager Chae, heading home?"
"Yes. You worked hard today too, Assistant Manager Kim."
He heard that, smiled, and said:
"Get in. I'll give you a ride."
"Oh... thank you!"
A little different from usual. His lodging lay the opposite way from mine, so I generally walked the twenty minutes home.
I carefully stamped the dust off my shoes and sat in the passenger seat, and he went right on.
"Thanks, Assistant Manager Chae."
"Sorry? For what..."
He was beaming. And seeing that, one thought shot through my head.
No way.
"Samsung Electronics. Thanks for telling me to cut it earlier. I took profit because of you."
"It dropped a lot, then?"
"Yeah. This morning, honestly, I was laying it on a little thick, but at the end the price went straight off a cliff. If I hadn't listened and hadn't sold, I really would have lost everything."
So that was it. I'd wondered why he was suddenly offering a ride—he must have wanted to say thank you.
"Well... it was probably luck. Still, I'm glad the advice helped..."
"Luck... right, luck, probably. But when a month's salary is swinging back and forth, it's pretty scary."
He said that even as he dropped me off and turned around.
"Thanks, Assistant Manager Chae. Lunch tomorrow's on me. A hot bowl of jjamppong."
"Thank you, Assistant Manager Kim. Get home safe."
I got in, washed up, ate dinner, and it was nine-thirty. Leaning on the bed, I was studying stock terms on YouTube.
"So... betting that it rises is a long, and betting that it falls is a short?"
"Holding a blue chip like Google for the long run, versus dipping in and out—broadly, those are the two."
The videos also rattled on about how you had to buy triple leverage to get rich, how you had to trade options and futures, but something in those words felt chilly, so I decided to start the ordinary way first.
A phone's awkward. I should do this on the computer.
I installed a brokerage program, then waited for the open at eleven-thirty. The name I was going into today was Apple. Number one by market cap, for now.
It's my first time, so play it safe. If I get stuck, the plan is to hold.
But with this ability, could I even get stuck? Tense, I pressed buy.
Click.
The first entry was a sensible scaled buy.
The way YouTube taught it: every day, buy a tenth of the seed at the hour that looks like the day's low.
So first I bought five million won the moment the market opened and dropped hard. I watched it climb back for a little while—and wasn't that a faint chill?
Yikes. Sell. Sell.
I'd carefully studied all of YouTube's solid advice—meet a drop by buying more, and the rest—and the second it was real, instinct startled me into hitting sell.
The result?
Five million sixty thousand won.
Sixty thousand won, in that short a time...!!
I got out sixty thousand won ahead. Sure enough, the moment I sold, the stock started pouring down like a waterfall again.
How much money was sixty thousand won? The monthly subscriptions and the building fees got a great deal lighter. Enough to walk into a Chinese restaurant and, feeling generous, order an extra plate of kkanpunggi, that crispy garlic chicken.
When I have jjamppong with Assistant Manager Kim tomorrow, I'll buy kkanpunggi with this.
I let that little daydream spin and went back to staring at the chart.
...This looks like the low again, doesn't it?
I watched it fall straight for about thirty minutes, then went back in. The moment I was in, the chill returned.
Sell... no. I'm already in. Once, the way I was taught...
Had ten seconds passed since the chill? The chart, twitching up and down right after I'd bought, suddenly printed a blue down-candle and stabbed lower.
Until a moment ago I'd been the cool one, recalling the maxims—answer a drop by buying more; U.S. stocks go up and to the right anyway. The instant I was losing money, that person vanished.
I knew it was a drop!!!
One look at that blue candle and every trick I'd learned on YouTube, buying more and the rest, was wiped clean out of my head. Fear hammered in my chest, and my finger went to sell on its own.
Sell. Sell.
Four million nine hundred eighty thousand won.
I lost eighty thousand...
It felt like the sky was falling. Was this what it felt like to be stuck in a stock?
If I'd stopped earlier, or sold, I'd have been up sixty thousand...
I'd even lost twenty thousand off my principal! Twenty thousand won was enough to pay for the YouTube Premium I was usually too stingy to buy—sitting through every ad—and still have money left!
Ah! The kkanpunggi! Ah! YouTube Premium!
...When Assistant Manager Kim says he's buying tomorrow, I should just quietly let him.
Looking at the chart, the stock kept falling for a long while after I'd sold.
Figures. Stocks are terrifying. It's gambling. Better not to—
But then.
A twitch. Another twitch.
Just like when I'd entered a moment ago, the chart swayed in a narrow band, up and down, as if it might rise and might not, tormenting everyone watching.
And then—
SHHHHHRRRRIP!!!!
All at once it blasted upward as if it had lost its mind!