Most of the girls kick with the same leg all the time. I tried changing off now and then. With the four-hole machine, using the left leg meant sitting a little to the right side. Also I tried once using my left hand to give the right a rest. Thus the boss observed me.
“Now see here, m'girl, why don't you do things the way you're taught? That ain't the right way!”
He caught me at the wrong moment. I didn't care whether the earth opened up and swallowed me.
“I know the right way of runnin' this machine good as you do,” I fairly glared at him. “I'm sick and tired of doin' it the right way, and if I want to do it wrong awhile for a change I guess I can!”
“You ain't goin' to get ahead in this world if you don't do things _right_, m'girl.” And he left me to my fate.
At noon that day the girls got after me. “You're a fool to work the way you do. You never took a drink all this mornin'—jus' sit there kickin', kickin', kickin'. Where d'ya think ya goin' to land? In a coffin, that's where. The boss won't thank ya for killin' yourself on his old foot press, neither. You're jus' a fool, workin' like that.” And that's just what I decided. “Lay off now and then.” Yes indeed, I was going to lay off now and then.
“I see myself breakin' my neck for thirteen dollars a week,” Bella chipped in.
So I kicked over 16,000 times that day and let it go as my final swan song. No more breaking records for me. My head thumped, thumped, thumped all that night. After that I strolled up front for a drink and a gossip or back to a corner of the wash room where two or three were sure to be squatting on some old stairs, fussing over the universe. When the boss was up on the other end of the floor, sometimes I just sat at my machine and did nothing. It hurt something within my soul at first, but my head and hands and legs and feet and neck and general disposition felt considerably better.
Lunch times suited me exactly at the brassworks, making me feel I was getting what I was after. Three of us used to gather around Irish Minnie, put two stools lengthwise on the floor, and squat along the sides. Bella, who'd worked in Detroit for seven dollars a day (her figures), a husky good-looking person; Rosie, the prettiest little sixteen-year-old Italian girl; and I. Such conversations! One day they unearthed Harry Thaw and Evelyn Nesbit and redid their past, present, and probable future. We discussed whether Olive Thomas had really committed suicide or died of an overdose of something. How many nights a week could a girl dance and work next day? Minnie was past her dancing days. She'd been married 'most twenty years and was getting fat and unformed-looking; shuffled about in a pair of old white tennis shoes and a pink boudoir cap. (No one else wore a cap at the brassworks.) Minnie had worked fifteen years at a power press, eleven years at her last job. She was getting the generous stipend of fourteen dollars a week (one dollar more than the rest of us). She had earned as much as twenty-five dollars a week in her old job at the tin can company, piecework. Everybody about the factory told her troubles to Minnie, who immediately told them to everybody else. It made for a certain community interest. One morning Minnie would tell me, as I passed her machine, “Rosie 'n' Frank have had a fight.” With that cue it was easy to appear intelligent concerning future developments. Frank was one of the machinists, an Italian. Rosie had let him make certain advances—put his arm around her and all that—but she told us one lunch time, “he'd taken advantage of her,” so she just sassed him back now. Bella announced Frank was honeying around her. “Well, watch out,” Rosie advised, with the air of Bella's greataunt.