After we get through the first 100 or so cows, I begin to wake up enough to awe over my commute to work this morning: it was about 200 meters by motorbike from the farmhouse in the pitch black beneath radiant 4:45 am rural southern hemisphere stars, the milky way marking my route overhead. Decked out in blue zip-up coveralls, rubber gum boots, rubber, gloves, rubber sleeves, and a rubber apron, I silently give thanks for living in an age of protective rubber as my hands, arms, and various other body parts quickly get drenched in piss, shit, and milk back-splatter. I vow to never again refer to building keywords, or trafficking creatives as "manual labor" or "getting my hands dirty". Inevitably, as soon as my arms and sleeves are covered in rubbery shlopp, I get an itch on my face and my nose begins to run in the cold morning air.
An hour into the workday, I realize that I am getting through more cows per row than the day before. I wonder how quickly I'm improving as I apply the four suction cups, "one, two, three, four, and next... One, two, three, four, and next..." So in my yet-to-be-caffeinated state, I accidentally start inventing new metrics and calculating my expected rate of milking speed improvements over time. "My CPH (Cows per Hour) must have improved a full 100% WoW (week-over-week)", I silently think. I mean, if you figure that there are about 35 cows per row, and I'm now making it a full third of the way down the shed by the time my two milking teammates finish their cows, I'm up from about 5 the week before... Yes, I have doubled my WoW CPH indeed! This is exciting. Though, I should probably create a more actionable metric, because realistically if I apply the cups too quickly and they fall off before the cow is fully milked out, I've not really helped the bottom line. So perhaps I should count cups-per-hour? Or better yet, I'll create a weighted metric which takes into account speed, accuracy, and other upper-funnel contributions, such as hose-downs (to clear the shit out of the path of the cups). This new metric could also take into account things that slow down productivity like instances of getting peed on or kicked or having cups fall off. Perhaps the equation would be (Cups per hour * 10) + (Hose downs * 1) - (Getting shit on *5) - (Getting peed on *2) - (Getting kicked *1)= eCPH (effective Cups per hour.... sort of like cost per effective thousand impressions instead of just cost per thousand impressions). Thus, I would still estimate my WoW improvement in eCPH to be around 85%, which is not bad.
Still there are other things to take into account, like cow flow (herding the cows in and out of the shed and ensuring that you don't miss any cows). I wonder to myself how much we could improve performance with some good old fashioned A/B testing on our messaging. For example, does "Get up girls!" or "Go on girls" work better? And if this phrase is used in conjunction with a tap on the butt or a startling tap on the ground will the cows move more quickly? Shoot, this is going to require multivariate testing...
Yep, this is what happens when you put an analytic digital marketing geek in a cowshed. I stop myself before running an ultra dorky milk solid production forecast (which would have begun with square hectares of paddock and involved percentage of grass eaten, distance walked from paddock to cow shed, and total piss volume, etc...). Instead, I revel in the unlikeliness of my being here. Remember Kent the courier from my last blog post? He came through with a job for me in the end: Because I talked to the guy at the youth hostel who helped me hitch a ride with the mail man who delivered me to a town where I decided to miss my next bus to another town, I stayed long enough for the mail courier to ask a friend who knew a guy who could use some help. Kent texted me one night to say, "I'll pick you up at 0800 tomorrow if you want this job". I didn't know where the job was, who it was with, or what it was I would be doing (Dairy farming, I suspected, but I didn't know for sure). So naturally, I stuffed my few items of clothing into my color coded stuff sacks in my backpack and waited for the mail man to pick me up the next morning. On the way to the farm, I jumped in and out of the passenger side, helping to deliver packages and letters to the good people of New Zealand's scenic south island west coast before being delivered myself to the farm in a place called Hari Hari where I was greeted with wonderfully nice people who I will be sad to leave.
I still, for the life of me cannot figure out a sock-gum boot configuration that does not result in 100% of the sock volume bunched up in the toes, leaving my already abused traveler feet to blister against unforgiving rubber heels. But the time has passed quickly this morning and we are almost ready to power wash the shed and pack it in for breakfast. Outside, the sun is beginning to emerge, creating a mountainous silhouette. The Wanted comes on the radio echoing through the emptying stalls telling me "I'm glad you came", and I think "I'm glad I came, too."
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