So, to set the scene here: I was homeless at the time and was desperate for any source of income. This was in 2018, and work was steady enough to be found rather quickly in the area I was living in. I get a call back after a few days of applying, and it’s a job as a milkman for a local dairy depot. The pay isn’t by the hour, it’s $125 a day, and there are absolutely no benefits and no time off. I knew going into it that it wasn’t a good deal, but we’ll touch more on why later.
I was crashing in a family friend’s fifth wheel for the time being, and unfortunately, said friend’s camper was roughly an hour away up into the mountains from where the job was located, and my shifts were from 9 at night until I finished the job, which typically took 12-14 hours. (The employer knew this, which is why they paid “by the day” instead of by the hour. $125 is less than minimum wage when spread over 14 hours and it was a legal loophole for them to pay less.) This meant that I would spend two hours a day driving to and from work, on top of driving all night for work. This probably sounds bad already, but I was truly in a worst case scenario position and if I didn’t grab a source of income, I could’ve lost everything I had left. So, reluctantly and begrudgingly, I took the job.
This is where I wish the story ended. But no. Oh no no no. The working conditions and manager for this place made Jeff Bezos look like Mother Goose.
I’ll gloss over the setup details for the job: you clock in and get your route. Company favorites would only have 100-150 houses to do a night, while the new hire cannon fodder like me would have to hit 400-500 a night in locations that were usually at least an hour away from the depot, just in case I wasn’t driving enough already. You would go pick up a box truck. The trucks had no cooling or refrigeration, so you would have to drive over to the “Ice Box,” which was a giant tank full of ice, grab a shovel, and chip and scoop out enough ice to fill the back of your truck. After that, you would drive over to the depot bay, load your food and drinks (we didn’t just do milk: bread, cheese, green chili, we did a whole variety. More on that later.)
Now, with all your product loaded and cooled, let’s talk about rules and guidelines and potential violations before you start your wonderful dairy delivering departure. The company had more penalties listed every night for deliveries than they had employees. If your load was out of temperature? You had to buy all the products in the truck out of your paycheck, no discount. If the truck got stuck somewhere or broke down? You had to pay to have it towed out of your own paycheck. Any deliveries aren’t delivered in full due to lack of product? You’re not gonna believe who’s paycheck that’s coming out of. All of this for a job paying less than minimum wage for 12+ hours of extremely physical and manual labor. But now, for the main event: let’s talk about the job.
Your job is as follows: you drive to house, you grab order, you run order to house, then run back and check it off the scanner. But wait. It’s not that simple. Because it’s never that simple. Most of these houses are owned by ultra rich ultra snobby assholes who don’t want you to drive your filthy peasant truck onto their luxurious driveway. These same people also would order 8 gallons of milk at a time, along with cheese, bagels, bread, and god only knows what else. The coup de grace, I mean the big dingleberry cherry on this shit sundae, is that company guidelines say you’re not allowed to walk while delivering. No matter how much you’re carrying, no matter how long this rich asshole’s quarter milk long driveway is, you run that order, rain or shine. 400+ houses. Massive orders. No pulling up the driveway. Even in the freezing pouring rain. At 2 AM.
Sound bad enough to quit? Well hold on now campers, because I’m not done yet. We haven’t talked about my trainer. We’ll call him Bill. Bill was so burnt out and dead inside he just did this all unblinkingly. He seemed fine enough, until I asked him about using the bathroom or taking a break over the course of the shift. No breaks allowed. If you stop to poop, the company will log it and deduct your idle time. Then, he says if you need to pee, there’s a hole in the truck. He gets up out of the driver seat, climbs the small barrier into the back where we keep the ice and product, and starts pissing on the floor by a little drainage hole for the melted ice. At this point, I’ve decided I’m done.
There’s just one last hurdle, truly the final boss: telling my entitled cheap ass slave driving boomer boss. After a week of grueling work and little to no compensation, I go into the boss’ office and tell him I quit. He goes ballistic, screaming and berating me and pounding on his desk. He screams about how he spent $5000 on my training (I spent a week working and they gave me a hat and shirt. The hat and shirt were not $2500 worth of quality between them, so I’m calling bullshit.)
After his temper tantrum, he refuses to speak to me any further about the job, and just keeps screaming for me to leave. About a week later I got my check for my week of hell.
Moral of the story kids: don’t be a milk man.