Other duties as assigned

Everyone jokes about "other duties as assigned" on their job description. Usually it’s meant to cover the minutia  of a job that can’t be easily captured in broad statements.

I’ve learned in my new job that it means a whole lot more.

Even though I have an office job doing community relations, research and project work, I do a lot more. That’s the nature of assisted living. We move furniture, we clean and fix things, we plant shrubs and flowers (and water them when it doesn’t rain), we paint walls and stain wood. We joke about other duties as assigned.

Recently, I was assigned to remove a wallpaper border from a resident’s room and then put up a new one. I finally picked a day to dress down and tackle the project.

It came off pretty easily. I was able to peel back the top covering, spritz it with water and scrape off the backing. Soon I was ready to put up the new border. I held it up to see how it would look. The walls are painted three colors: taupe on the bottom, cream where the border had been, about eye level and little above, and a pale lavender above to the ceiling. I held up the pine cone border over the cream. It looked nice, but I wanted to be sure. So I called in a co-worker. She agreed it looked nice. She even held it up so I could stand back and look. Yup, we thought it would go nicely with the colors and theme of the room.

I’ve taken down a lot of wallpaper in my life. Layers of it, sometimes, over rough plaster walls. It tests your will. After all, if you start to remove the paper, you are committed. It’s not a job you can leave half done.

But I’ve never put up wallpaper. Neither my husband nor I particularly like it. (See note above about removing the nasty stuff.) So, when it came time to put it up, I asked a co-worker if she thought I should use the water method alone or the border adhesive we had in storage. She said she’d only ever done it with water. I knew I’d have to paste on the adhesive, and you still need to book it, so I thought using water would be easier.

She said she’d help when I got to the long stretches when it would take two people to handle the job.

I measured and cut my first piece, wet it in the sink, booked it for the required two minutes and put it up with a wet sponge. It went up pretty easy. I worked my way around the room, doing the smaller sections, leaving the two lengths for the end.

I opened my last package and started to measure the long pieces. I dithered over where to cut it for the seam on one end. I measured for my final piece so I’d have everything ready to go when my co-worker got back to help.

There wasn’t enough. I was almost 3 feet too short. Grr. I didn’t think we had any more in storage. What to do?  I could seam the long wall and maybe repaint the short one so it’s one color without the cream border. I couldn’t come up with other solutions. Try to match it? I did find a match online, so maybe that’s an option.

My co-worker came back, and I shared my dilemma. She said she’d check to see if we happened to have more in storage. “Let’s leave it until Monday,” she said. I agreed.

A few minutes later she came back in the office as I sat looking at wallpaper borders online.

At about the same time realization was dawning on me she asked, “Is it upside down?”

Rats. I made a face. It was. At least according to the pictures online. The straight edge should go at the top – as if you were placing it against the ceiling as a border. I’d turned it around. I thought it looked like a shelf with pinecones resting on it.

She started to laugh. I apologized. She thought it was funny. “Now you have a story to tell your family when you go home tonight,” she said.

“Yeah, that I’m an idiot,” I said.

Everyone who stopped to see what I was working on during the afternoon probably thought I was clueless, too. They told me it looked nice. Maybe they were just being nice. Poor girl, they thought. She doesn’t even know how to hang wallpaper.

Oh well. I still think it looks nice this way. But it is an excuse to take it all down and find enough of a border to cover all the walls.

That would be another duty as assigned.