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The Great Weiner Heist of 1910

It was 1910, and the workers of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory were hungry. On the eighth floor, the bookkeepers were having an unauthorized wiener roast (using hot dogs bought with stealthily siphoned funds), and they weren't sharing. The mouth-watering smell of cooking pork drifted up to the workers on the ninth floor, who were very tired of shirtwaists.

Agatha Barnhardt concocted the cunning plan.

By firmly stitching together shirtwaists, the workers were able to bypass the doors (locked by their employers to keep them at the job until the end of the day) and lower Jane Wilkinson, the smallest, lightest worker, to the window below.

The bookkeepers, distracted by the small fire they'd started in a steel garbage can, didn't see Wilkinson slip inside.

Several packages of uncooked wieners rested temptingly beside a black typewriter on a desk three feet from the window. Carefully, Wilkinson crawled to the desk and filled her shirt with raw hot dogs. Returning to the window, instead of climbing back up, she filled the lowermost shirtwaist with wieners and went back for more!

Barnhardt and the other workers hoisted the first improvised basket of wieners up with no trouble. The second shirtwaist went up with equal ease. But the third....

Wilkinson had become cocky.

Spurred on by her unqualified success in matters of thievery, she had actually attempted to steal a cooked wiener from an accountant as he was eating it!

She made it to the window, but the shirtwaist rope proved unequal to the combined weight of Wilkinson and two angry bookkeepers. It tore. Wilkinson fell to the fire escape, the hot dog which had been her undoing still firmly clutched in her teeth. Barnhardt, leaning so far out the ninth floor window she nearly fell herself, was horrified, thinking the girl had been killed. However, staggering to her feet, Wilkinson waved the hot dog triumphantly and let out a cheer.

"Hooray for hot dogs! Down with stingy accountants!"

"Why, you little—!" the bookkeepers (saved from involuntary defenestration by the hands of their brothers) spluttered incoherently as young Wilkinson took off down the fire escape, delighted at having an illicit half day free.

The attempted reprise in 1911 didn't go so well.

#short story #old #1-15-20

I literally had several panic attacks where I just wanted to go home and see Copper. But now I can't. I understood that he was gone when the vet tech took him but I don't think I allowed myself to really process it until I saw his ohio state bed that night or maybe not even until I drove back to my house.

#journal #1-15-20 #copper