That Creosote Moment

When I was a teenager I would regularly spend weekends with my Aunt and Uncle in a village about 5 miles from my home. My Aunt was my mother’s younger sister. She had a young son who I would babysit for when they went out.

One weekend, when my cousin was just a toddler, my uncle and I were busy doing jobs in the garden. He had a couple of old cars which he kept on the road by doing work on them himself. On this particular day we were doing various paint jobs. So, we were creosoting the garden fences, and whilst we were doing that he thought it would also be a good idea to apply some creosote to the undercarriage of the car to protect it from water.

We were also ‘keeping an eye’ on my cousin whilst my Aunt was out for the afternoon. He would have probably been 3 years old at the time.

After a while we took a break to have a cup of tea. And it was after the tea break that we found the catastrophe. Whilst we were sitting down eating biscuits my cousin had got hold of the brush and applied paint all over the body work down the sides of both of the cars.

Did we shout at him? Could we tell him off? Well, no we didn’t. He had, in his mind, been helping us get the job done.

Why am I telling you this story? Well, the term ‘creosote moment’ has become used regularly since I recited this anecdote where I work. We use it to describe the situation where someone has a job to do. To me, it’s a simple task. But they take the task away, and in the interests of being helpful they build on the task. They add what they perceive to be useful features to the task and do those too. But from where I am sitting they haven’t done the job. And in the nature of the anecdote, it takes a long time to undo a problem with creosote on the paintwork of a car. Creosote tends to strip off the paint and leave an unbelievable mess.

This strikes home the real need to be clear whether you are delegating a task to be done in exactly the way you are describing, or you are giving a project to be done with plenty of scope for interpretation. It’s also really helpful to know whether the person you are delegating to knows the difference between applying creosote to the bottom of a car rather than the pristine bodywork above the waterline!