I was in a bank once and there was a young guy, about 17, who kept trying to take out $50 where it specifically said that you could only withdraw $20 increments. I tried to explain it to him but he looked at me like I was trying to explain quantum physics.
There’s a third way, too. One day my department was having lunch at a restaurant and the subject of tying shoes came up. One of the women in our department is Chinese and she showed us a way none of us had ever seen before. We were all floored. I’ll try to remember to have her show me how to do it tomorrow so I can describe.
My 25 year old brother does not know how to write cursive.
Me, I’m 27 and have yet to use a dishwasher. Wouldn’t even know where to start.
It’s like a laundry machine, but for dishes.
Please excuse me for a few minutes while I sputter in amazement…
My dad never learned until we got this new one, where when you close the door it automatically sets itself to the “normal” setting and the light over the “Start” button comes on, meaning “push me! push me!”. So you do and it starts. It really is a beautifully user friendly machine.
Not that he, you know, does the dishes or anything now, but at least he theoretically understands how it would be done, if he were to do so. Ever.
She’s better at things now. She’s lucky to have a husband that loves to cook, so he taught her how to do the measuring.
Also my husband, who’s one of the most inteligent people I know, was confused about pints, quarts and gallons when we got married.
And since I’ve been picking on my family, I may as well confess that I can’t peel things with a knife. I’ve always had to use a vegetable peeler. I think it’s partly fear of slicing into my flesh, and partly not being able to hold on to everything correctly with my freakishly small hands.
While I’m not quite that bad, I think you’ve hit on the real point about many men and cooking. They will spend hours researching stereo equipment or cars or how to build a new computer, but when it comes to food, neither the process nor the finished product is interesting enough. They (I) sometimes wish I could stop eating, as many times it’s more of a inconvenience that doesn’t give enough pleasure for its trouble.
Many women don’t feel this way at all. Well, there you have it: the genders feel differently about things. I hope that’s not a shock to anyone.
Can I just come and eat some? I know! I can be the judge!
Please?
Put me down for can’t drive a stick shift. I also have to really, really think about which is left and which is right. And I have no idea how to check/put air in my tires.
As for taxi whistling, all those sites about playing the pennywhistle and such make googling for instructions very hard. I was able to find:
http://bluebones.net/whistle/#method1
http://www-inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~pshyu/self/whistle/
and that’s it. I know I’ve seen a detailed instruction manual on the web before, but I can’t find it now. I want to learn, too.
Oh, and I don’t know that I’ve ever been on a public bus. As a little kid my parents drove me everywhere, and then when they would have let me take a bus, they didn’t go within 2 very hilly miles of my house. That meant I was already biking just to get to the bus line, and I didn’t need the bus at that point.
I remember how frustrated we were with my buddy when he didn’t know how to pay for his groceries with his ATM card in about 1991. He’s from a farm outside a town of 500 people, and his parents naturally had very traditional roles. His mom did all the inside stuff and the shopping, and his dad and the two boys did all the outside farm-running stuff.
I’m get confused about that, too. I have to stop and think, “Now, how many pints are in a quart? Is a half gallon two quarts or one?”
My excuse is that I attended elementary school during the early 70s and learned New Math and the metric system - I never (never!) learned feet and inches and pints and quarts and ounces and pounds or how many feet are in a mile. We were told that by the year 2000, the whole country would be using the metric system, so we better get to know it.
I had to play catch-up in high school, and never really “got it.”
I can’t even judge how far some place is, if someone asks me how many feet or yards or miles away it is. I honestly have no clue.
Hold your hands up, palms away from you. Your left hand makes an “L”. That’s how I tell. 
And I really don’ t know my pints and quarts and gallons and things. I have to look it up. It’s not something we really learned in school or anything, I guess. I never really need it, except in the odd recipe, and then I look it up in the Joy of Cooking.
I have to say, honestly, that after reading this thread I can safely say I can do almost everything everyone has said they cannot do.
I can:
cook
tell time
tie my laces both ways
use a computer/phone (rotary and touch tone)/fax machine
clean (clothes/dishes (manually or in a dishwasher)/floors)
balance my checkbook (not that I ever need to, I keep a fairly good running balance in my head, and check everyday online)
I know US and metric measurements
drive stick shift
swallow a pill
do home repairs
survive in the woods
whistle (but not the ‘taxi-hailing’ method with my fingers (but I can whistle by sucking in AND blowing out))
skate (ice, roller, and rollerblade)
ride a bike
operate an elevator
operate an ATM
etc…
Seriously, I cann’t think of a simple skill I cannot do, save for ones I have never done before/not learned, but I can say that after I learn how to do it I won’t forgot. I am very good at remembering skills and how to operate things. However, to make up for that, my short term memory is shot. I cannot remember appointments, to call my mother, when something I want to watch might be on TV, etc…
So, I’m forgetful, while at the same time I never forget a damn thing, 
FWIW, inability to swallow pills is widespread enough that when I go to sign up for a medical study, one of the questions they ask is, “Do you have any problems swallowing pills?” (Answer: No.)
Yoicks. I did that before. (Really, I know the difference between a tablespoon and a teaspoon… I just had a brain fart. And all that happened was that I took too much cough syrup and stayed awake until 8 AM.)
Sure this has been said before, but we’re listing things we can’t do.
I can’t gurgle liquid of any kind.
I can’t do simple mathematics (apart from adding numbers) in my head without spending a good deal of time on it and shutting out all sensory input. (strangely, one of my brothers is a human calculator)
I find it difficult to spell words verbally (though it’s a piece of p*ss with a pen or a keyboard)
I can’t sing in the presence of other human beings. I don’t mean I sing badly. I mean I can’t even attempt to sing.
A quart is a QUARTer of a gallon. That’s very easy to remember. Which means a pint is the other one, half of a quart.
I have a lot of trouble, though, doing most simple arithmetic in my head. Nowadays I can just say “That’s why God invented calculators.” My youngest daughter, OTOH, can do amazing feats of arithmetic mentally. Why, I have no idea. When she was still small enough to ride in a shopping cart, she saw a carton of a dozen eggs. “What’s a ‘dozen?’” (Oh, did I mention she read early?) Anyway I explained that was 12 of anything. “Oh,” she replied. “Then two of those boxes would have 24 eggs.” “Yes…” “And three of them would be 36.” She kept on with that until she got to the 3-digit answers. Sheesh. It was taking me longer to figure out if one answer was right that it did for her to get to the next one.
I have always been unusually good with spacial awareness. Knowing what my left is[sub] (except one time driving when I quite happilly turned right when asked to turn left, and said “what, you said turn left and I did”)[/sub], and what other people’s left is , regardless of their direction or orientation, without having to think twice. I am particularly good at the spacial awareness parts of iq tests. But I suck at the mathematical parts. So it seems unusual to me for someone to have difficulty with left and right, but it also makes me think how cool it is that people’s minds can be so different.
If someone mentions a weight value to me I have no perception of it. I can imagine a metre or a yard, but not a kilogram or pound.
Manual Transmission driving is quite easy (in the UK something like 98% of learners learn and pass in manual transmission cars) but to this day I HATE roundabouts because as I approach them every single co-ordinational skill I learned since I was 2 leaves my brain.
There was a girl at my school who couldn’t understand perspective.
I am losing the ability to write my signature. It comes out as a P with a scribble.
I’ve never dived head first into a pool. Like the singing my body just won’t let me do it.
football (the one where the foot and the ball make contact more than the hand and the ball, and the ball is ball-shaped) I am a pretty good defender if I do say so myself, pretty accurate striker, ok goalkeeper, but I can’t for the life of me dribble the ball past another player.
I can make very good scrambled eggs, but have never in my life made mashed potatos without parental supervision.
my eights are snowmen (if you are on the ball you will have figured out by now that I am reading the thread backwards)
I think I finally learned how to snap my fingers when I was 20ish, and whistle when I was 17ish.
can’t use chopsticks or jump rope, but I’ve never bothered to learn either.
I can’t go underwater without holding my nose (but I am quite agile with one hand and two feet, last time I swam that is, about 10 years ago)
Can’t make sense of a mac.
Do you mean actual pasta spaghetti, or the meal spaghetti-bolognese? (sp?) which in my world gets shortened to ‘spaghetti’
If it’s the latter, what’s so unusual about this? Watching my mother do it it seems obvious that there are steps/ingredients involved that are somehow not pre-programmed into human brains at birth. I don’t know how to cook spaghetti. I would have to be taught (even if you did mean just the pasta part).
I just remembered another one…
I can’t drink small amounts of alcoholic beverage without continuing. I am an all or nothing person and I envy people who can have “a few” of anything.
I am ridiculously directionally inept. I have lived in one town for 24 years and still get turned around. Side streets? No way. I often have to stop and think of the best way to get somewhere.
As a result of this, I almost never get to drive to lunch. And I like to drive! 