Witnesses compare the feat to the legend of the sword in the stone, minus the sword, the stone, and any part being difficult for the person who gets credit.
Pictured: nothing. The jar was not photographed, on account of nobody thinking, in the moment, to photograph a jar.
DAYTON, OH—In what witnesses are calling “a moment of pure, uncomplicated masculine triumph,” local IT technician Greg Halloran, 34, successfully twisted open a jar of Vlasic kosher dills Tuesday evening, mere seconds after his girlfriend Jenna Ruiz had spent nearly four minutes slamming the jar’s lid against the kitchen counter, running it under scalding water, and prying at the seal with a butter knife until her wrist audibly cracked.
“I don’t know, I just kind of grabbed it and it popped right open,” said Halloran, flexing what he described as his “pickle hand” for approximately the ninth time since dinner. “Some guys just have a gift.”
Ruiz, still icing her palm at press time, confirmed that she had, in fact, “loosened it up for him,” a phrase she reportedly muttered under her breath in the exact tone Excalibur must have used right before some randomer named Greg wandered up and yanked it out of the stone.
“It’s like the legend,” said longtime Halloran family friend Pete Ostrowski, who was not present for the incident but heard about it four separate times by Wednesday morning. “The chosen one doesn’t need brute force. He needs pre-applied brute force from somebody else, and then he just receives the glory.”
Sources say Halloran immediately held the jar aloft, said “there she goes,” and set it down without eating a single pickle.
Ruiz, who performed what onlookers described as “the actual labor,” the “structural jar-fatigue,” and “ninety percent of the torque,” has reportedly grown suspicious of a pattern in which she is always the blacksmith and never the king. She cited at least six prior “sword-pulling” incidents this year alone, including a spaghetti sauce jar, a stubborn childproof cap, and, memorably, an actual literal jar of pickles in March.
“I’m basically Excalibur’s whole backstory. The lake, the forging, the enchantment — and then some guy in cargo shorts steps up going ‘huh, that was easy,’ and everyone names a kingdom after him.”
At press time, Halloran had reportedly begun telling the story to a coworker as “the time I opened a jar that was, like, really stuck.”