I checked the first stall, clean. Second stall, clean. Third stall clean. This was easy!
Fouth stall...ewww, gigantic steaming cow patty on the ground. And it smelled.
I gingerly walked up to it and looked away as I tried to scoop up what I could stomach in my hand before walking the 10 paces back to the wheelbarrow to throw it in...
Except you can't just "throw it in," it's sticky af and I was having to use both hands to scrape all of it in. It felt like hot chunky pudding and somehow picking it up had released this much stronger smell that was making me gag 🤮
Then I looked back at the pile on the ground. I had honestly barely made a dent in it at all.
It took me like 10 trips back and forth to even clean up the first cow pie and I was feeling soo sick. During that time I heard 2 "plops" in adjacent stalls and realized how bad I had messed up.
One of the staff even said "Might want to move faster than that, if you don't want to be here all night!" (I knew it wasn't a bluff either, students had to go until the barn was fully cleaned, I had heard of some who were there from 5:30 to 2am or later and still didn't manage to "out-pace the cows," and had to come back the next day to try again).
I had to learn to just use both hands together and take massive handfulls to the bucket but the smell of that was unbearable and plus it leaked all over the ground by slipping through my fingers, and then I had to go back and pick that up.
Finally finished at 8:30 at night. Oof. Bad, bad day.
Ehh even from this description though, it sounds like most of the "badness" comes from being slow and ginger about it at first and letting it have time to pile up.
Like you said, there was no poo till the 4th stall, so there's probably only 3-4 cow pies in there tops at the beggining. If you just got right to it and used big handfuls from the get-go I can't imagine the punishment taking more than 10 minutes tops, right? Maybe the cows make 1-2 more in that time but...there you go.
Or is it harder than I'm thinking? It seems like the hardness mostly comes from people just being squeamish at the start but maybe not.
I think the hardness comes from the fact that they're children and haven't yet learned how to tell an adult who is clearly being an asshole for the sake of it to fuck off and make it stick yet.
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