Milk Monitor Carrier
November 20, 2006
The handled wooden box is always dark and moist on the bottom, glistening with milk that seems to always leak out of the supposedly sealed half-pint cartons. I enjoyed the freedom that came with the job, the daily escape from the classroom a few minutes before lunch, but I always hated the sour milk smell that permeated the small windowless room at the end of classroom block. My very infrequent memories of the scent still make my nose shrivel with distaste.
Milk monitors in Great Britain and Australia had the additional responsibility of monitoring their peers’ consumption of sometimes sour or curdled milk. Fortunately, I only had to pass it out to the kids whose names were included with each day’s delivery.
When I had this job, the milk cartons were in a thick wire crate. The lunch-ladies would put it onto a wagon for me along with my cashbox and straw dispenser, and I would wheel the wagon out to the entrance to the cafeteria. When students came through the line, I would take their dime or free milk ticket and give them a carton and a straw. If I was feeling generous, I’d let people work the straw dispenser themselves even though it held up the line. It was the kind where you push a lever and two wooden arms would disappear into the dispenser, with it’s logpiles of straws laying tantalizingly behind plexiglass, and emerge with one straw just for you in it’s little notched arms.
I completely forgot about the milk that used to get handed out until I read this. I wonder if they do that anymore (with all the lactose intolerance)?