I have been very busy over the last week driving a milk tanker for Fonterra out of Clandeboye in South Canterbury. This is my thirteenth season driving tankers and for the past two seasons I have been job sharing with another driver which gives me more time to focus on my hunting and dog training. A couple of the good things about working for such a big company like Fonterra is that they look after their workers well and they have very good gear to work with. My day starts with a meeting of all of the Clandeboye drivers, about seventy of us. We are told how the factory is running which affects how we unload where the bulk of our milk will be going for the day eg Stirling, Oamaru, Stubholme, Clandeboye, Dunsandel, Christchurch, Darfield or culverden. When I started driving out of Clandeboye our peck day for milk was five million litres in one day now our peck day is looking to be up around seventeen million litres for one day, thats a lot of truck and trailer loads of milk at twenty six thousand litres per load. When our meeting is finished we grab our run sheets which tell us where we are going for that shift. We could be traveling any where from Balclutha in the South to Omarama in the east to Culverden up North. We have to take sample vials with us which take a sample of each farmers milk so they
get paid on the right amount of milk solids and that there is no contamination in the milk. As I mentioned earlier Fonterra have good gear, our milk tanker fleet is one of the best fleets of trucks in the country. The oldest a milk tanker will get in our fleet would be seven years old as they clock up the km very quickly. Each driver has their own truck and there are three drivers per truck, one person will be driving on day shift another driver will be driving night shift and the third driver will be in their days off. This roster changes around so we work three days three nights and three days off. I have driving Scania’s Foden’s and am currently in a 500 horse power Volvo. This truck is thirteen months old and just about to clock over three hundred thousand km. It is just like driving a car, it is even automatic all I have to do is put it in drive and steer it. All of the tankers are fully equipped with GPS mapping so once I have logged on, the GPS will show me which is the quickest way to drive to that destination by following the blue line on the map. Once at the farm the truck will know weather I am at the right place or not through the GPS so all I need to do is connect up the pick up hose and put a vat tag on the hose that transfers all off the information the farm vat to my truck and sample vials. The sample vials have a tag on the bottom of them that collects all of the information like how many litres that I am picking up, am I the first
truck in there, what temperature is the milk and what time of the day the milk is being collected what number run and what truck is collecting the milk. The truck will pump the milk on at two thousand litres per minute so it takes just over thirteen minutes to get a full load if we are picking up from one farm. Once loaded its back to a factory to unload. At Clandeboye factory we drive through a big rinse to wash the truck down and if we where going to hot wash our truck then we would go through the big truck wash which helps to scrub the outside of our trucks. After this we go to the sample room and do a quick test on our milk to make sure that it is OK to go into the factory. Then we move onto the unloading bays where the milk will be sucked out of those tanks in about six minutes then we put a flush through our tanks and pick up hose to remove any milk that is left in there. Then back out on the road for another load. From driving in the gate to leaving again takes about fifteen minutes.
One of the big advantages that I get out of driving trucks that a lot of other truck drivers don’t get and that is that I turn my radio off while I am driving this way I can create stories in my head so that when I sit in front of my computer I can write them a lot easier. Also I practice giving speeches so that when I am in front of an audience I do not have to have notes. At my local Toastmasters club they have nicknamed me no notes Bill. I gave a speech one day on how our minds worked and on the previous week I practiced 29 different phone numbers of our members, you can imaging their surprise when I told every member at that meeting their phone number with out any notes.
I challenge any person who has read this whole article next time you are driving somewhere on your own turn off the radio and let your mind wander you will be surprised how many more things you will think about and to get those things to stick into your mind you need to repeat this a number of times other wise it is to easy to forget them, just like when you get a good idea into your head and then you start listening to a song on the radio and as quick as that you forget about what you where thinking about.