I Lost $1250 In Three Days. This is Why You Need an Emergency Savings Fund

Time hop back to November 2017. My teeth have never been a stellar section of my health. I had braces back in middle school until high school and lost both retainers so my teeth shifted out of place over time. The result is that I have slightly crooked teeth that are also sensitive since braces make your teeth sensitive. Sometimes you just can't win. My teeth have never been the best example of my health. My wisdom teeth were a gamble. Back in 2016 my wisdom tooth, bottom right of my mouth, started giving me trouble, but only for a day. One day. I can ignore that. Take Advil. Sleep. Gone. 2017, early November, I started having pain that didn't go away but because I was being stubborn, a motif in my life for sure, I didn't go get it checked out because I was too busy being at work. I was also too busy trying to wrap up my first semester of grad school. So I gambled that the pain would go away.

Nope. Don't bet on your teeth. You'll lose every time.

The wisdom tooth became infected because it was impacted and didn't break through the gum line. It grew more painful and my tongue and the nearby tonsil became infected. This went on for weeks. You'd think I would've taken care of it immediately. You and I thought wrong. I clearly don't think though. Fast forward to the Friday before Thanksgiving and it finally reached apex discomfort. I couldn't close my mouth properly. I was losing sleep because of the pain, my appetite in full disarray. I was at school and tried eating something because I still had to eat. I couldn't eat much solids so meat was out of the question. Extensive chewing was painful. Bread was hit and miss depending on if it was sliced bread or a hard loaf. So I went for only soft foods. I found a place that had banana pudding.

Pro tip: Never and I repeat never eat something as sugary as banana pudding when you have a mouth infection. Good banana pudding is pure sugar. This pain was pure nightmare.

The resultant feeling was like pop rocks sizzling under your skin. My tonsil, already suffering from a residual infection, swelled to the size of a jellybean. If I wanted to close my mouth I would be biting into my tonsil. That's it. I need this tooth out now. I found an orthodontist that was willing to do the procedure the same day. A modern day saint. He took the tooth out in an hour. My part time job gives me dental insurance. I'm also on my parent's plan because the law allows me to be (thank you far reaching government). Despite that insurance covered half of the procedure, I still had to drop $300 to cover the other half. That day I felt two types of pain: The pain of money and the pain of having felt a lidocaine filled needle having been shoved into my jaw three times. The next few hours had me suffering from the most pain I've ever felt in my life. And on top of that I was out $300.

Fast forward to the Monday of Thanksgiving week. I'm still dying but at least I have painkillers for the suffering. I still have to go to class but I'm having car issues. Great. What fun. How convenient. A valve cover gasket needs to be replaced. Well I'm stuck now. But what do I need to drop? $400? Let me stay in bold for a second. This is why I'm convinced that Mondays are cruel reminders of how hard life likes to hit. Rent was due that Monday also. $550. I lost $1250 in the span of three days. You don't want to know how hard that was to take. All the money I had worked hard for, suddenly gone. Because life likes to time my weak moments and coalesce other events to occur just to kick me when I'm financially weak. Now, I was able to cover all of that and still have enough left over for the next month's rent. This is why I work as much as I do.


You don't need this to be you when life decides to get expensive.

Ladies, gentlemen, nonbinaries, if you saw "$300" and cringed and then saw "$1250" and your butt clenched so hard that it tore the upholstery in your seat, then you need an emergency fund. I'm 23. An emergency fund for someone my age doesn't need to be extensive. I don't have multiple family members I need to financially think for. But I do have expensive things like rent, health, and a car. Which is what most people my age have. I had enough saved up to where I could cover $1250 of expenses in three days and still cover next month's expenses. Granted, I would've been on some seriously thin ice with my money but I was still able to do it. 

Now go and do in remembrance of my pain.

Short Story: Embarrassed

I found a way to pop my lower back while sitting in my car driving to school from work. If you learn how to breathe into your stomach and shove your tongue into the roof of your mouth then your core will lock hard and somehow pop your back. I learned that from Dr. Layne Norton. At least it does to my back after work. You can load planes all day long and feel fine that day, but the moment the next day comes then your joints start calling your tab. On especially cold and windy days when I get up from my car my kneecaps feel like they're splitting in half, pinned against a table. A splitting feeling. Removal. My lower back takes a hit because people want to ship car parts in broken boxes and we are expected to lift these things safely yet quickly. You cannot do a quick job safely and you cannot do a safe job quickly. I'm sure my bosses know that but they also don't care because it's not their lower backs, or their hands, or their legs that are taking a hit. But it was Friday so my resentment was curbed because it was pay day. The American ritual of us forgetting labor pains and we get what we're told we deserve: money for our toil. No amount of money can give my joints back my cartilage but it can buy me coffee. I can make good of coffee.

I walk into a coffee shop, knees sore and lower back slowly forming arthritis, just to have a pure moment of my own. I get to pay for this with my own money. I get to have this moment because of my own labor. It's the lie I tell myself to make me want to go back to work on Sunday. It doesn't make the coffee taste any better. It's the lie I tell myself to motivate me to work harder for a job where I can die. A 3000 lb. container can crush me at work and I would be replaced the same week that I died. You sort of have to lie to yourself to hide the futility of your efforts. We were all numbers, easily removable and easily hired. At least I had my marginal moment for myself. I still don't buy into this self-care and loving yourself crap but at least I could have this one all for me. I had my backpack with me so I can do a little bit of reading. I was up since 3:00am that morning so I didn't know how much of this reading I would retain but it was worth a shot. I had to commit to the process of learning about the future I wanted, even if I was tired and in pain. But my left hand had coffee in it so I was somewhat okay.

A gothic vibe of sort. More slow moving. Smoky without the smoke although I wouldn't mind the smell of cigarettes. I grew up in a city so I was used to the smell of cigarettes. I didn't have enough money to smoke, I always found it cool because the friends I wanted to be friends with smoked religiously. Addiction is expensive. I left that to the ones with more money than me. Filled with dress shirts and high heels, faces caked with foundation and eyeliner clumped over itself like crumbs falling off a hard cookie. Clean hair and veneer teeth, glasses aiding glazed over eyes, mouths that moved a lot but said nothing. They were really good at saying nothing. I was impressed at the utter energy committed to nothingness. I don't know how Heidegger would feel about it. He probably wouldn't even want to be here anyway. Sip. Still too hot. Take the top of the cup off. Let it sit there for the next fifteen minutes. Crack open the book. Great. Asset-liabilities ratios. My favorite. Why isn't there a font for sarcasm?

Fifteen minutes later. Coffee is still too hot but my age has taken away the sensitivity. My job wasn't the pain I wanted to feel, hot and cold food burning my tongue or slapping my sensitive teeth was my preferred choice of torture. If anyone was going to make me hurt it was going to be me and by my allowance. If only that was a rule I had for my life. Sip. Eh. Still boiling lava but okay. Chug. Dyson Ball it into my system. There were no survivors. It's not that I hate my job. It's that I recognize physical capital is sustainable to a point. I don't want to wake up reaching for the Tylenol. I don't want to wake up and dread moving because my knees won't allow me to do much. I only have one back. I only have a few joints. I don't get a rebate for the wear and tear I put on me. I want out. So I'm trying in the most complicated way to put myself into a new industry. An industry that is run by people that forgot their package jockey days. To love your wallet with all your mind but not all your strength. I put music into my ears but shut it off. The talking atmosphere and music are too much for my ears to handle. Working at an airport and listening to six planes take off and taxi in during an operation destroys your ears. Even with hearing protection it only does so much. Even with Tylenol I can only take so much. Even with motivation and being headstrong I can only take so much. Sip more coffee. A lot more.

I finish another chapter and its commentary. I don't feel smarter. I'm a package jockey. What business do I have of reading this sort of stuff? We ship broken phones, car parts, sex toys, letters from soldiers to parents, advertisements for discount specials at Walmart and Gamestop, bulk orders of Almond Milk, and boxes of oxycodone and percocet, which I'm convinced are being bought and sold to employees. I can imagine that a lot of my coworkers might run to painkillers a bit too fast after work. It scares me, I want out. I work with a lot of people that can go somewhere incredible but won't, don't know how to, or can't because life circumstances don't allow it. Life bends our arms more than people think. Almost done with the coffee. At this point I check if my broker is open. I tried playing a fantasy of making money on the market but realizing I don't have the wherewithal to do so. I'm not smart enough yet. Not yet. Timing. I'm a package jockey. We don't get much respect, if we do it's really just pity masked as respect. I get up, pack my things into my backpack that I've had since 8th grade, and start walking from Peachtree Street to the other end of it. I grew up in Staten Island and I was finally back in the city. I was back to where I wanted to be. Lost and dreaming.

And I'm still new to this area of life so I recognize that I have zero concept of how far away things are. Nobody told me that my Vans weren't suited for this. I was ready to discover. I always was. I walk down and to the right for what felt like a mile. I had no idea where I was going but I committed to memory the Google Maps directions I pulled up on my phone before leaving the coffee place. I felt out of place walking past banks and skyscrapers and lovely cars and lovely people. Me with the callused and cut up hands and pop rocks joints and the sawed kneecaps and shredded ligaments. The wear and tear disqualified me from even looking at this sort of life. This white collar life that I wanted to get into somehow. I'm a package jockey. We're up at 4:00am loading planes and moving people's gifts for them around this time of year. Gifts they don't even want. Maybe I thought too much for an unskilled laborer. It made me feel daring. How dare I, some worker, try to think about higher things? I'm me. That's who. I give myself authority. And so I walked with this unearned sense of pride. I have my small money. Maybe I really do think too much about these things.

My work shirt still damp with sweat, me wearing two shirts and a sweater and shorts under my jeans, a pair of socks with wool socks on top of them, all just to keep warm. It never worked. You were always freezing. 9 degrees cold, you were still outside. 12 degrees and windy and raining hard then you were still outside waiting for all these planes. I didn't have gloves for a very long time and the gloves the job gave me were no better than having no gloves at all. If you were giving your all to work that you could be killed at, mainly by being crushed, wouldn't you want to get out? If you were in a position that had you running your body into the ground day in and day out and you could be injured and replaced in the same week you were fired, injured, or killed on the job then wouldn't you want to put yourself in a better position? Wouldn't you want the money you make to work for you in the best way possible? This was my walk to this brokerage firm. My way, however insignificant and small to these people that handle billions of dollars by the hour, people with incredible academic training and high social standing, an institution that stands as monument to the capitalist system I'm tired of working so hard for, and I'm only 23, that can also take my money to try and help me go somewhere else with it so I don't have to work this hard later on in life. Let's be real, nobody is reading it the way I am. As if it's some sort of intense battle against some larger than life foe. They just see it as taking my money. I see it this way. It's the lie I have to tell myself to go after my daily bread.

I walk in and I feel even more out of place. What the hell am I doing in here? I shouldn't be here. I should be spending my money on items and trinkets like a lot of my coworkers do. On a given day while we're waiting for the planes to come in I might see them pulling up photos of some of the shoes and cars on their wishlists. But I want the stuff I want to buy to matter in the future. I want them to matter now. I want out of this exhausting work. I want out of this job that was created to keep you here. Some of my coworkers were in my position, in grad school and pursuing something else entirely and they end up at this job. You don't go to work here. You end up here. Like Denny's. You don't go to Denny's. You end up there. Usually because where you really want to go, Waffle House, is either too far away or you don't have enough money to get there so you can only afford Denny's. I looked a mess, I hadn't showered that morning since I slept over at work the prior night. I usually shower after work because that makes more sense. When you're up that early you're not trying to impress anyone at 4:00am and if you are then I bet they're not someone worth impressing. The man who helped me figure a few things out, Dan, was nothing short of friendly and professional. He could see some of where my money was, though a bit odd in some places, worked. I shook his hand. It was only a measly $60 or so that I gave him. But it was $60 that can turn into $100 if you give it time. Decades. I was willing to do it. He didn't ask me what job I had. Thank God. I was embarrassed to mention I was a package jockey. Embarrassed to give my laborer money to a brokerage firm that might be able to help put me into a better spot in life soon.

                                       I mean...if the photo says it then is it wrong?

Maybe it is a fight to be made. Maybe you should seek this conflict. I walked back to my car. Uphill. It wasn't snowing but I loved every second knowing that I'm somehow going to make this ugly mess some people call life work. Even if it will work out decades after this point. I still looked and felt out of place walking past these banks and lovely faces and lovely bodies and expensive status symbols. I'll get there. Not without some more Advil first.