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MY better half Sally, the half who is supposed to love and cherish, says to me my “lack of adaptation to technology is hurting our business”.
Ouch!
It’s like a dagger through my hard-working Luddite heart.
But the truth is, she is correct (although I will deny having ever said that if you try and spread a rumour).
No, I don’t know what an app is, let alone how to download one.
I don’t do Facebook.
Or Instagram.
Then there are all those people who keep sending me important and urgent documents by email – foolishly thinking I actually read my emails.
I don’t even have a clue about how to access my own bank accounts.
We just spent an obscene amount of money on a computerised cow monitoring system and I can’t access it – to top it off, Sally gave me a terry towelling hat as a joke and I like wearing it.
I should have had a warning system set up on our cool room so it sends me a message when it gets out of temperature specification.
Had I done that earlier, we wouldn’t have had to dump a whole week’s worth of production.
I found out the cool room was, in fact, not that cool (11 degrees), so we put the products in the fridge truck and took them to Swan Hill Wholesalers.
How good is it that at 8pm, when Jason Collins was supposed to be at his kid’s school concert, he opened up so we could get everything cold?
Big shout-out to Jason! They have been our No.1 supporter from day one.
With the milk temporarily on ice, I wasn’t really sure what to do, so opted to do what I do best – sleep on it.
And it worked.
At about 2am, when I snapped awake and thought, “you idiot! You need to chuck the lot!”
So I took it home again to dump it, and said to the staff that if anyone wants to grab some, so long as they used it within the week it will be fine.
There was about 300 boxes of milk and chocolate milk. I expected five or 10 of those to disappear.
But when I looked in the next day, all the chocolate milk was gone and only half a pallet of milk remained.
I figured at least I didn’t have to pay someone to tip it down the drain, because someone then took a heap to feed to calves, and away it went, and I’m grateful.
A young boy who works for us confessed to me later that day he had already consumed six chocolate milks that day!
Despite all that, there is a good news story – and it’s all about the support we receive.
I have a friend, Mike, who knows a lot about milk processing.
When I am in crisis, he’s the guy I ring to check I’m doing the right thing, as he is so generous with his time and his advice.
Only getting paid a thank you, he’s helping because he wants to see a small Australian family business that’s having a go succeed.
In the same way Swan Hill Wholesalers want to see us succeed, and the same way the broader Swan Hill and Lake Boga community also want to see us succeed.
If it takes a community to raise a child, it takes a bigger community to grow a business.
People working together and supporting each other, that’s what you get when you live in the Mallee, so thank you for being patient when I stuff it up.
And I’m going to try learn some new technological tricks with the alarm system, and the cow computer thingy – but I won’t go as far as Facebook or Instagram, and my terry towelling hat is definitely a keeper.
