The New Hire Who Brought a Stool
A new hire shows up on the first morning in Dublin with a hand-carved milking stool, and the cows treat it like a royal summons.
A young woman named Marisol Ables walked into my barn on a gray Monday morning in March carrying a three-legged milking stool over her shoulder. It was hand carved, sanded smooth, and had her initials burned into the seat. We have used milking machines on this dairy since before she was born. I did not have the heart to say so.
I put her on the day shift anyway, because she had a firm handshake and a clean pair of boots. I figured she would catch on. She stood at the head of the parlor, set the stool down in the aisle, sat down on it with great dignity, and waited. She looked like someone expecting a cow to come to her by appointment.
What I did not expect was that the cows would go along with it. Josephine, my lead cow, strolled right up, stopped beside the stool, and stood there as if she were waiting for Marisol to begin. Then another came, and another, until there was a polite little line of Holsteins in the aisle, all facing Marisol, all waiting to be milked by hand. A crew of four grown adults stood in the doorway and said nothing at all.
Marisol, to her credit, did not flinch. She pulled out a bucket and proceeded to milk Josephine the old way, quiet and steady, while the rest of the crew went about their business. It took eleven minutes. The machines did it in four. But when she was done, Josephine turned her head, gave her a long look, and licked the cap clean off her head.
She works for me still, and she is now our relief herd manager. She keeps the stool in the office as a reminder, and we have all agreed that the cows respond to her a little differently than to the rest of us. If you want to know what skills a new hire needs before showing up, the pages on dairy careers are a good place to start, and I tell more barn stories on farm.FM.