Just Another Tuesday

By: Uncle Dave Yanetti

I was a milkman.  Yes, I was a modern day milkman.  I delivered milk to dollar generals, restaurants, and mom and pop shops.  It was physical, dirty, smelly, sticky, and had an extremely early starting time (3-4am to be exact).  The main way to move product in and out of stores is to use a dolly.  When I first started I thought, no problem! How hard could that be?  Find your balance point and you are on your way!  Well, it turns out, milk is pretty heavy.  Four gallons fit in one case and we wheeled in six cases at a time.  Twenty-four gallons at a time, milk is pretty heavy.  

On one of my first days, we stopped at a dollar store we had every Tuesday.  Entering this store proved difficult as you had to walk on a raised sidewalk with the milk and the door opened towards you.  To make this easy, my trainer recommended I put a crate down to hold the door open while he went to the back of the store to organize the milk.  Too easy, the door was held open and I walked up with six crates of milk, I angled myself towards the door and began making my entrance.  Suddenly, I was stopped.  The frame on the bottom of the door was raised which made it difficult to enter.  No problem – I stepped back, lowered the stack, took a deep breath and charged forward.  Immediately upon making contact with the bottom frame of the door, panic overwhelmed me.  I realized that I was no longer in control of the dolly.  A tool that I used to transport milk now turned into a catapult launching missiles across the store. Before I knew it, I was standing in a warzone that was occupied by milk warfare.  In every sense of the word, it looked like a milk bomb exploded.  Everywhere I looked, I saw droplets of milk – the floor, the cash register, the ceiling, bags of chips halfway down the aisle.  Nothing left unscathed.  My trainer came up to the front of the store, staring at the scene in absolute amazement.  I began to pick up the milk as he began to mop with one arm (his other arm was broken and in a cast, so he had to hug the mop in order to use it).  The store manager watched in awe as the dynamic duo that had just wrecked their store began cleaning it.  We finished that stop and hopped in our truck.  On our way to the next stop we laughed so hard we were in tears.  As all the older gentlemen I would see in the stores would say, no use crying over spilt milk!