Welcome back to Story Time with Georgia, where I relay little stories from members of the Colorado College community. If you have a weird interaction on a bus or go metal detecting or do something else of that nature, remember it very well to tell me about later!
By Georgia Grellier
Who: Friend of cousin of Kristen Kinchla ’20, which is indirect but I do feel like I know this girl now
When: Circa 2008
What: Marley and Me except less emotional and more weird
There is nothing sadder in movies and life than dead dogs, which is why, on some level, it makes sense that family would want to be away when their beloved pet kicks the bucket. However, on another level, leaving the house until your dog dies and hiring someone to pet-sit in the meantime is insane, which is exactly what a wealthy New York City family asked Kristen Kinchla ’20’s cousin’s friend to do.
Cousin’s friend, whom we shall call Annie, only knew that her job was pet sitting during a family’s vacation when she made her way to their apartment for details about the job. Only once there does she find out, when it is clearly too late to back out, that her role is actually just to be there when their dog passes and “to take the dog to the vet to be cremated, and then bring back the urn that they picked out at the vet.” With that, the family departed, and Annie was alone in a fancy apartment with a dying animal. Don’t worry, she got paid a ridiculous amount of money for this.
Two days later, this dog sadly died as expected. Keep in mind that this dog was not a tiny lap dog. It was a regular-sized golden retriever, and the issue of getting it to the vet was a big one. “For some reason she doesn’t take a taxi,” Kinchla said, but this is pre-Uber and taxis are expensive, so let’s give her a break. Instead, she put the deceased canine in a duffel bag, made her way to the nearest subway station, and hopped on a train, where a man casually asked her what was in the bag. Smoothly, she told him that she was moving, and it was full of stuff that didn’t fit in the moving truck, to which he responded, “Cool.”
Before she knew it, though, this seemingly friendly stranger snatched the bag at the next stop and bolted off the subway with it. “Little did he know he was not lugging 50 pounds of valuable home items, but 50 pounds of dead dog,” Kinchla told me.
Despite the distant relationship between Kinchla and Annie, the story is so infamous that “all distantly associated persons tell it to everyone they know.” I don’t blame them, especially because the guy who stole the dog corpse definitely does that too. I will forever wonder where this dog’s final resting place truly was.
Takeaway: Rich people are often insane. Beware when dog sitting.
