Work Experiences, Vol 2

Aaannnd we're back with this episode of "Jobs I Have Had".
I realized I'd forgotten in my other post an important job I worked BEFORE retail, so I'll do that one today, and retail next time.

Milkmaid

This was a fun one. I worked for about two years, off and on, for our neighbours in PA at their dairy farm. We got to know them because my parents actually bought our house from them. They have a small dynasty starting with Dick and Blanche (who are close to 90 and probably healthier and more limber than a lot of 20 year olds), going down through Dwight, Dean, and their wives, all the way to Dean's two sons, and a couple babies and a wife that belong to the youngest of Dean's sons. Also a lot of cows.
They hired me as a milker. If I got the evening shift I ended the day covered in basically every fluid a cow can secrete. If I got the 4am shift, I started the day with all those fluids, plus the 6 top country songs Froggy plays at 4am when there are only farmers to hear them.

Actually, one of my favourite work experiences was a 4am milking on a Christmas morning. I finished up around 9:30am and Dad drove me home to an excellent breakfast and presents over snow-covered fields as the sun was rising in a blue sky and everything was glistening and new.

 

It looked kind of like this. Only bigger and brighter. 

Usually if I worked the 4am shift I would end up milking beside a silent and crusty neighbour we used to have. He was also the one responsible for Froggy on repeat.

If I worked later in the day I either got to work with Blanche (who was a delight), or a couple hispanic guys. Sometimes I'd hit the jackpot and it would be both. On those days Blanche and I would sing showtunes and piano-pounding hymns and laugh at everything and the hispanic guys, understanding only every 15th word we'd say, would have quiet, whispering conversations about us, shrug, and go back to the milking.

Sometimes there would be doughnuts, which we would happily consume with one rubber-gloved hand while the other was busy wiping manure off of a cow's teats.

Here is a cow with clean teats and a milking machine attached.

We'd drive the cows in (when I was there, there was space and machines for 6 at a time on each side of the milking parlour--I think they've since moved up to 12 on each side in their new parlour), clean them off with towels and "dip" (I forget the chemical make-up of this dip)--and sometimes powerful jets of water for particularly tenacious clods of poop--and then hook up the milking machine. Then you run back and forth while that set was being milked, keeping the tubes all un-twisted, and sometimes rescuing a milker and redoing it if a cow kicked it off and soiled her udder.
Towards the end of the milking we'd get troublesome cows that needed injections of oxytocin to let down their milk, and cows with mastitis (that milk got collected in separate containers and didn't end up with the stuff you drink). Some of these needed to be milked by hand (my favourite part!). 

 

Do you SEE the delight in this woman's face?

 

Sometimes Dean would rush through, always yelling and cheerful, with one sinewy arm clad in a vet's shoulder-length plastic glove, and proclaim that he had to go "breed a cow."

That meant this.

Sometimes I got put in charge of feeding all the baby calves. This meant mixing formula into some of the milk and either pouring it into buckets for the bigger calves, or actually bottlefeeding the very young ones. I was good at teaching the newborns to accept bottles. 

 

I would also clean out these little huts.

Funny story from my time spent milking:

So in Tennessee I had made a friend in an Irish dance group who was engaged to a guy in an Irish music group (they were good). She'd given me a t-shirt from her dude's group. The group was called "Kula" which means "brotherhood" in Gaelic or something. So I had this t-shirt with a big celtic knot, and then "KULA: Explosive Irish Music" on the back. One day I'm wearing this t-shirt in the barn and milking away happily with a couple of the hispanic guys. I notice they are looking at me and giggling. Finally one points to my shirt and says, "Kula. What that?"
I explain my t-shirt-acquiring story to him, and what it means in Gaelic. The two guys exchange looks and grin some more, showing bright and happy teeth through dark skin and some cow poop and dip.
"Kula not mean brotherhood," he says.
"What?" I said.
"In Spanish," he said. "In Spanish, kula mean this," and he turns around and points vaguely to his rear end.
I never could get the internets to tell me exactly what the definition was, but I never wore the shirt again if I knew there would Spanish-speaking people around.