Talking to the milkman
I’m working at home most of today. It’s days like today I get the chance to interact with the local neighbourhood. Over lunch today I heard the milkman drive into the neighbour’s driveway. The moment I’ve been waiting for. Back in 2003 we were getting our milk delivered on Wednesday. We cancelled when we went to Cairns for a couple of months. So today’s the chance to return the polystyrene ‘eski’ to the milkman.
And it turns out that our milkman is dead. He died just over a year ago, after a binge on alcohol, smokes and meat pies. The guy who does the Dairy Farmers round on Sundays and Wednesdays now is the same guy who has been doing the Pauls round on Tuesdays and Fridays. I’d been wondering why we hadn’t heard back from the guy when we got back from Cairns.
The reason we went with Pauls was the fundraising promotion in which Pauls donates money to schools in return for the redemption of their plastic milk bottle tops. I had a chat to one of the guys who works for their promotion department and he’s said that the “Collect-a-Cap” campaign has won them a huge share of the white milk market in Queensland.
It’s interesting moving from one country to another. We’ve had a few family members over from New Zealand who are struggling to work out the colour codes for milk. NZers are used to silver top being full milk, dark blue being full milk homogenised, light blue being low fat homogenised, green being trim, yellow being calcium-enriched trim. Here it’s all different and depends on what brand you’re buying.
