An accompaniment to @dkhbrit post about being hopeless but with a different slant.
What mundane tasks are you really good at?
What are you great at?
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Musings on the byways of popular culture
I am the total opposite of @Munster on the other thread.
Making a good cup of tea is my one skill. It’s not difficult, but a surprising amount of people make a bad one. Not me though, i could turn pro (if such a thing existed)
If you do turn pro, I’m afraid I could be your competitor. I am practically useless at many things, but I can make a very nice cup of tea, and have been told so on several occasions (yes, my life is certainly one giddy whirl of fun and japes).
Other than that … erm … umm … Putting music collections in order? Remembering bits of film, TV, and music trivia? Not the most financially rewarding of skills, sadly, but you work with what you have.
I’ve been told I make a really good cup of tea, but I don’t drink it so I wouldn’t know. The more cynical part of me suspects it’s all a ruse to flatter me into making the drinks all the time.
Yes.
I suspect a lot of people get praise for their tea-making from people who want tea but can’t get their arses off the sofa..
Going shopping without a list and coming home with EXACTLY the right amount of stuff to fit in the fridge. Not one item too many or one space unfilled.
To be fair, buying exactly the same number of cans of ale each week is not that remarkable.
I am very good at farting. The demand for this skill is, it’s true, niche, but, in the right company, I’m your man. Managing the interface between a result and an “error in judgment” is especially acute. Strangely, none of my wives have ever had much respect for this well honed aptitude, but my grand daughter, aged 5, seems built from the same sturdy stuff.
You are Le Petomane and I claim my five francs.
In bygone days perhaps your skill set would have proven more lucrative than now, when it seems cruelly under appreciated.
History records how Roland The Farter, jester to Henry II , was rewarded with a Suffolk Manor House and as many as 100 aces for his services to mirth!
At my age, you never trust a fart, and you never waste an erection.
Other way round for me.
You never waste a fart? What do you? Bottle it?
In my younger days in the bath I would fill a graduated cylinder (plastic not glass, I may be stupid but not that stupid) invert it and then place it over the anal orifice. When a gaseous grunt took place I would catch it in the cylinder and take the measure of the farticle volume.
He blinded me with science…
…SCIENCE!
@tiggerlion I may not have thought that gag through…
Maybe he publishes it?
I still remember the time many years ago when my neighbours told me that their daughter, then about 9, was going through a phase where she found farts funny. Me too, I said. I was in my forties at the time. Nothing’s changed.
For some inexplicable reason, I am really good at (a) being clumsy and knocking things over and/or off tables/shelves etc, and (b) having remarkably quick reflexes to save/catch said items from falling/breaking/smashing etc.
Annoying Mrs D – it’s a gift yet also a curse
Sleeping. It’s my superpower. Both the long nigjt’s slumber and the short siesta, I have it nailed.
Other than that, swimming is the only thing I’m better than average at.
I’m a good baker – cakes, bread, rolls – as Blue put it so well, All Rise – well mostly.
Also the family crafter of polite yet firm emails to difficult organisations/individuals. Currently the German Embassy, the Icelandic Foreign Office etc etc.
Blimey, what have you done?
I am the Pope of Procrastination, the Don of Delay.
I’m a great systematic fault-finder on electrical circuits.
Better-than-average memory for song lyrics.
I’m a good cook, good at DIY, generally handy sorta chap. I’m husband material, me.
Also pretty handy in a quiz team, as long as there’s someone else to take care of the football questions.
I used to be the family quiz champ for years, but lately my knowledge of films, TV, music etc. has become less current/mainstream and therefore less useful. Never was much cop on anything sport-related, though I can surprise myself sometimes with facts that have been assimilated accidentally.
Decent cook generally but I make fantastic olive and sun dried tomato flat bread. So much so that our neighbours ask me to bring it if we go to theirs for dinner.
Loading a dishwasher so that everything comes out both spotlessly clean and dry. And correcting other people’s attempts, whether or not they ask me to.
And packing lots of gear into a car. I’m also good at Tetris. They are related, I think.
I enjoy efficiency in all things.
See also flight cases
Absolutely. Engineers can think in 3D, or something.
Drummer’s nightmare: Someone insisting on helping you pack up, at the end of the gig.
The best flight cases have custom foam so it’s obvious by the shape of the cut out, what goes where. This doesn’t stop some otherwise intelligent people from forcing the wrong item in and sitting on the lid to close it however.
There is a certain art to loding the dishwasher. Do not Overload, keep a certain separation, and give the stubborn stains a rinse first ( egg and beans being prime candidates, but also greasy pans need a dissipation first)
Also: anything spud-related. Unless you like a fine Mash covering over everything.
I’ve never had a dishwater and part of the reason is that I seems to me like you have to wash everything before you put it in.
You wouldn’t hand wash dishes that are still covered with food or thick with grease (I hope) and the same thinking applies to loading a dishwasher.
Yes, anything solid ends up in the filter at the bottom, which then has to be routinely removed and flushed. Ewww!
Official guidance is to scrape not rinse.
Yep.
That’s my job. No-one else seems to be aware.
With modern dishwashers you don’t need to do more than tip waste food into the bin. Personally I don’t put frying pans in. Now and again one or two plates or a fork have a few spots left after washing. This isn’t sufficient cause for doing as they do in Sweden and brush off every item under the tap prior to loading such that items are almost clean.
This is exactly the sort of devil-may-care attitude that leads to kitchen anarchy and ultimately a complete breakdown of civilisation. It’s not about crockery and cutlery, it’s about heading off a disgusting foetid swamp of grease and bits in the filters. Exhibit A: the daughter’s dishwasher, which eventually stopped working altogether after I went on strike and refused to clean it out any more.
Of course there’s always manual washing up to consider.
https://youtu.be/K6R9fY8lfGo
Exactly. We scrape and rinse here.
We used to have a clean plate competition at meal times. Simply serve bread with the meal. It was a 4 way tie every meal time. Could almost put the plates back in the cupboard without washing them.
Why not served the food on bread, no need for plates.
No pans, no glasses.
“I can’t see! Dow-da-dow-da-dow-dow.”
Great googly-moogly!
You’re my kind of chap.
Being an accountant, my super-power is numbers, and the handling thereof. Maths in general. L love a good proof and I’m the kind of man who has a favourite bit of maths (the Birthday problem, since you ask).
I have plenty of time to hone this power, as I (rather harshly in my view) rarely get invited to parties.
I’m also pretty good at scientific names of beaked whale species, and if there’s a less in demand super-power than that, I’ll be astonished.
I pretty much rule at everything. My big failing is lack of self awareness.
Chortle.
Well played.
I can cook an edible meal, can bodge DIY which works, amuse children, calculate structural equation models, write research papers, engage the troubled and gather information with which to clarify their needs, and, just occasionally, achieve the greatest of all married-man achievements: make my wife laugh out loud (intentionally). I am happy with these competencies.
I’ve been mulling this over since this afternoon and I can’t think of a blessed thing.
Arf!
Cooking, music (playing, reading, not writing), word games, idleness.
Knocking one out. Well I’m always happy with the results anyway.
Ironing. Don’t have to do it much these days but I’m pretty good.
Frying and scrambling eggs. It’s got to the point where if I’m visiting friends and family and there’s a cooked breakfast on the go they’ll always ask me to do the eggs. Just can’t peel the fuckers if they’re boiled.
I trust you know the secret of ironing ….
Don’t be afraid to walk round the ironing board.
I saw a butler iron a short on YouTube.
Iron the collar and then fold it down and do up the top button.
Squirt the water on from the iron’s nozzle thing first and then do the sleeves, the back, then the front – 3 minutes.
Hang the shirt with the top button already fastened is much easier and you can instantly tell which shirts are done if you’re getting dressed on a gloomy morning.
*shirt
Sleeping.
Eggs are a bastard. I can make a great full English without the eggs which I guess means it is not full. The missus has to stand in for me on those.
Pretty decent at crosswords but not as good as my Dad was. Was decent at table tennis but haven’t played for a while.
Apart from that not too much to separate me from the rest of the population.
I can fry a decent egg – crispy on the edge of the white, runny yolk – but I can’t crack them straight into the pan. Has to be into a glass first. Maybe that’s more paranoia of a broken yolk than inability.
I’ve been practising cracking them straight into the pan recently, and it’s become another thing I’m quite good at. If I’m cooking two eggs I still crack them into a bowl though, so they’re both ready at the same time.
“I’ve been cracking them straight in the pan” made me think we were still on farts, employing the old china microphone for added amplification!
Ah yes, the dawn chorus.
“Eggs are a bastard” – alternative Afterword T-shirt…
Sleeping while travelling.
Back of a Transit van, with the Snare Drum in its case as my pillow ? “ZZZZZZZZ”
Seat on an airplane ? (whether it is Glasgow to London or Glasgow to Boston) “ZZZZZZZZZ”
Senora Malo – not so much ….. *NUDGE* “are you asleep ?”
Domestic stuff. Cleaning, washing, ironing, shopping, tidying up. I’m yer man. Good on the admin too.
I’m ok at DIY and repairing things too. My greatest achievement was when Twang Jr was about 7 he had a much loved little cap gun which he dropped on the path and it broke into about 30 constituent parts. “You can fix it, can’t you Dad” he pleaded. I sat for nearly two hours working out how it went back together and presented the repaired item the following day at breakfast to great acclaim.
A couple of months later he dropped it in a river and it was never seen again.
Seeing if you can fix something you’ve never seen before is great fun, if frustrating along the way. I managed to get the adjustable combination lock on my Samsonite suitcase dislodged on the way to our hotel room this summer. I spent about 30 minutes examining the different cogs and hard plastic and metal elements to see how they might go together. Several times, it clicked in but clearly wasn’t working, which left me in mild despair.
I had to try to picture the mechanism inside the lock and place the parts in one precise order before closing and, finally, it all worked!
I’m a great believer in leaving things that are broken to see if they somehow mend themselves.
With this newfangled AI stuff, I shouldn’t be surprised if we don’t soon fail to see self-mending toasters on the shelves in Curry’s. Eh! Eh!
I mean. Where’s it all going to end?
I’m a great believer in hanging shirts in the wardrobe and waiting for them to iron themselves.
Hang up shirts while damp, usually all right without ironing. I don’t really iron anything.
I like to iron shirts (collar, shoulder, arms, front, back front – the butler forgot the shoulder, very important). But a well hung shirt, under a jacket, will lose any significant creases in Bonn – it’s Rhine valley humid here, all the year round.
What’s wrong with all of you? Buy non-iron shirts! Then the need to know how to iron them is unnecessary.
They don’t look as nice as an ironed shirt. Also, more than once I think the label should say “My Arse!” rather than “Non-iron” because they come wrinkled but not just as much as the others.
Perhaps it’s the Auckland climate because hanging up shirts in the wardrobe when they’re still damp doesn’t work either. Or hanging them up in a steaming bathroom. They still need ironing.
I resigned to this some years ago now. I bought a really good ironing board that I can raise to a decent height and an iron with a really long cord. While I won’t say I look forward to the job, it’s not that bad. If I set aside half an hour and put a podcast on, I can get quite a few done.
I used to iron all of my shirts on a Sunday evening, ready for the working week. Early on in our courtship Mrs Paws said something along the lines “I really like that you just don’t care about things. I mean, you don’t even iron your shirts!” I stopped ironing them after that.
I find clearing a big basket of ironing quite satisfying. There’s a lot less now I’ve retired and TJ has left school. Also I’ve consciously reduced the service level – T shirts/jeans only if really crumpled etc. I put a good TV thing on our a movie and do it on auto pilot. Ain’t no thing.
Nonsense. I have a few Tyrwhitt shirts that come out of the dryer totally crease-free. You have to get them out and hang them right after drying but results are uniformly excellent
This … hang them up straight from the machine and the Thrywitt are good to their claims
(see also DKNY)
I’m a Tyrwhitt wearer but always iron them? Hang them up straight out of the tumble dryer, you say?
Works for me (although straight from the washing machine, not dryer)
I’m yer man for trivia, general knowledge, puzzle solving, that sort of thing. Just don’t ask me to peer-review your PhD on quantum mechanics.
Curses! I’ll need to ask someone else now…
Never mind filling the dishwasher, I fixed our beeping machine this morning ahead of a kids party (I’ll pay myself €100 call out) making pizza dough and all, proof-reading, quizzes – general knowledge or music, identifying artists in vintage 2000ADs, making Superman’s leg out of any suitable material, online research ahead of significant purchases, dad jokes…
I’m sure there’s more.
I’m pretty good at remembering useless information and usually do quite well at TV quizzes like University Challenge etc. This ‘skill’ is not always a good thing. Many (too many years) ago I won a school prize for English Literature in the same term as I failed the subject at ‘O’ level. The school exams were mainly factual, ie what year was the Battle of Agincourt etc, whereas the ‘O’ level was mostly about analysis of poetry and literature which I was rubbish at.
Like several comments above, I do seem to be a good quizzer. Besides having decent general knowledge, I also mean this in the broadest sense in that I do seem to have this knack of helping others remember stuff and being able to sort the wheat from the chaff when a team is throwing answers around.
I also make a mean paella.
I’d love to hear your recipe
Knowing where places are (UK edition). Once I’ve seen a place on a map, it’s logged in the database, forever registered. Where do you say were from? Nempnett Thrubwell? Praze-an-Beeble? Church Pulverbatch? They’re all there.
See also: learning lyrics.
See also The Meaning of Liff.
See also, and written 25 years before The Meaning of Liff, Ware, Wye, Watford by the great Paul Jennings. (Scroll down for the actual piece.)
https://hack4hire.wordpress.com/2013/12/02/before-the-meaning-of-liff/
I’ve found that I can make a mean iced coffee – very handy skill in these end times, as the average temperature starts to climb. However, I may be responsible for my grand-daughter’s new found interest in coffee (aka caffeine addiction).