Wrestling with bagpipes!

The idea of milking your own cow and drinking the milk sounds wonderful. Unfortunately the reality is somewhat different. Our Grandparents, for those of you who are from farming communities, may have had the job of milking down to a fine art. After all, as my cognitive psychologist friends would say, it's only a fine motor skill. Get the basics right and all will fall into place. However, we modern folks have a different set of skills (which includes defly flipping open a milk carton), which does not include wrestling with bagpipes! Now plain old hand milking is something most people can do with a bit of practice. Even I have mastered it now that I have learned not to twist and pull (Bessie, of course, soon appraised me of the penalty for not doing it correctly - a hoof in the ear). The milking machine, however, is a whole new dimension. No one mentioned (funny that, I think we have said that a few times now) that you need four hands and a double jointed backbone to put the inflations in place. Now I'm 6 foot 2 inches tall, and not a young man any more, we don't have a pit in our milking parlor and the "claw" piece has four inflations, which fit over the teats, and a vacuum valve which needs pushing in once the pulsator is working correctly - you'all still with me? All these various bits are joined together by rubber tubing, and which flop all over the place unless held up by (you guessed it) my four hands. Not only that, unless you like the taste of cow poop and sawdust in your milk sundae, you also have to prevent them from lolling all over the floor, with the selfsame hands. Of course this is easy (hah!) with a well behaved cow, but add into the mix our Bessie, still achy from lack of calf interest in her milk bar, and not all that keen on having foreign bodies attached to her teats, and the resulting dance is the title of this post. No one said it would be easy, but they didn't let on to all the undignified and embarrassing things we neophyte cow people can be drawn into.
BTW: it is an extraordinary and humbling experience that Bessie and Rosebud have given us the gift to enjoy this natural product, untainted by process or additives.