You’re About To Hit The Ceiling

(I’m renovating an office building and am working on getting one of our best suites cleaned out and painted before I leave for vacation. I manage to get a full coat of paint on all the walls in all the offices in the suite plus the reception area before my last day. I have two workers that I’ve assigned to finish the job and show them what I need. I walk them through one at a time, assigning them sections.)

Me: “Okay. This room is most important because the ceilings are high and I’m short. I need you to paint this section in the beige and the rest in white.”

Worker: “Should be no problem.”

Me: *with second worker* “Do this wall here, from this end to this end.”

Worker #2: “What about this wall?”

Me: “Just concentrate on the section I gave you and we’ll go from there.”

Worker #2: “But I can stick around for five hours and get it all done.”

Me: “No, don’t do that. I only have so many extra payroll hours. So just do the section assigned and we’ll see what else I have left.”

(I leave feeling comfortable that they’ll get it done. I come back and all the areas I’ve cleaned and painted have been torn up with tape on the walls and none of the areas I assigned have been done. My boss is wondering why I have 12 extra hours of payroll.)

Me: “Why didn’t you do the parts I told you?”

Workers #1 & #2: “We did! You said to paint the walls and the other parts didn’t look painted anyway so we did those.”

(So instead of being able to take pictures for the website, I’m going to have to spend another several days painting what I had assigned to them because I’m out of overtime.)