I was born knowing how to type. Ok, not really, but I could type faster than the Keyboarding teacher when I took the class in 6th grade, and I have absolutely no idea where I learned. I never had any typing-tutor programs or any other formal training. My step-grandfather started teaching me DOS when I was about four, though, so I suppose it just comes from experience.
I also share the ability to memorize songs quickly. In fact, I know every Tears For Fears song ever made, including the B-sides and unreleased tracks. That includes lyrics AND individual instrumental parts. I can’t quite make that claim for Radiohead yet, but I’m getting there.
Let’s see, anything else? I can read text out loud in languages I don’t know with pretty decent accuracy on accent and pronunciation. I won’t fool anyone into thinking I’m a native, but I can (and have) convinced natives that I’ve studied the language for years. Of course, that falls apart as soon as they say anything to me, so it’s not really that useful, but it’s still a cool “power” to have.
I can smell silk. I walk into a department store and can immediately locate the nearest item of silk clothing. It has kind of a metallic odor to me…
Er, okay, I guess that’s just weird
I can also, like dwc1970 , do lots of math in my head. I was in UIL Number Sense in primary school and learned all sorts of tricks for doing long division, fractions, etc. in my head. It comes in handy while shopping at sales with multiple discounts, you know the ones that are “50% off the original price plus another 33% off, then an additional 10% off before 10 a.m.” I’m a walking wonder, I tell you
I can make a recognizable model of anything using any children’s construction set.
Usually this translates into making animals or vehicles for my kids. I’m not talking Legos either, that’s too easy. I prefer to work with things like wooden blocks where gravity alone holds everything together. I also like it when the components are really limited – 20 or 30 pieces tops, preferable all identical.
I developed my own form of shorthand so I could write on the bus as it bumps along and still have it be legible…to me, that is.
I can cut my own hair and get compliments on it. I just cut it in a cute little shag the other day in a way that I think compliments the silvering amongst the brown.
I’m good at getting to places I’d only been to once years before. We were just recently looking for a hotel we’d stayed at a year ago. The city we were in was flat so it was hard to find any landmarks and the road atlas we had only had a tiny inset of the city with only 5 or 6 of the main streets on it. We didn’t remember the name of the hotel so we couldn’t call for directions but we still wanted to stay there that night. Even though my Dad knows I’m good at remembering how to get places, he was driving and thought he could find the way himself. I could just feel that we weren’t in the right area and we needed to be over “that” way. The little map had a street called Fruitvale that went away from the other main streets on the map and I started telling him we should go over there. After nearly an hour of searching, he finally heeded my advice. Voila, in about 10 minutes, we were at the hotel and I got to tell him, “I told you so.”
It’s not really a skill but my wife and daughter think I’m a hero. I can pick up and remove from the house any spider or bug or creepy crawly that has them cornered.
Enquiring minds want to know how it is that Draelin has been tied up so often by so many different amateurs that she can make authoritative statements about what “usually” happens in that situation.
Let’s see… skills I have:
-I’ve never met anyone who’s better than I am at 4-square
-I can “hear” CRTs when they’re on
Not weird. I do it too. Especially knit silk tops, for some reason. Maybe there’s more surface area there releasing silky goodness. I’ve identified co-workers shirts without seeing them yet that day.
I can put the entire fingernail area of my thumb behind the knuckle of my pointer finger (the one where finger meets hand, of course. The others wouldn’t be nearly so impressive.)
I have a very sensitive sense of smell, to the point that I can often tell what people are having for dinner as I walk past their house on the sidewalk. I haven’t noticed silk’s smell in particular but I will look out for it.
I also have a gift for punctuation. Currently I am reading the thesis of my thesis supervisor, which has been inappropriately littered with commas by her supervisor. I am removing them, and adding the ones that he missed.
I’m sticking to things that other people have told me I’m good at…
Add me to the list of those with a natural knack for parallel parking. I don’t claim to be an especially good driver, but I definitely have the gift for slick, right-first-time parallel parking, and any number of passengers have remarked on it.
I’m good at taking photographs. Even though I’m just an instant point-and-click kind of photographer, people say I take good shots, notice interesting images that others would miss, and have a good eye for composition.
This is funnier that it sounds… I can extemporize almost endlessly in the style of ‘documentary’ voice-over artists, about almost anything - stuff we see while driving along in the car, what’s going on at the party, scenes in public places. Hard to describe, but people tell me it IS funny. It’s as if you’d swear I was working from some pre-written script that had been carefully written and edited to fit the scenes unfolding before you, and I get the intonation and delivery just right. It comes from my first-ever job, when I really did write documentary commentary scripts that were given over to professional voice-over artists. After a while, the formula kinda ‘stuck’ in my head.
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One thing I do better than most is troubleshooting… i.e. taking a given problem, and determining the cause quickly and efficiently. Typically as such: Identify the problem, generate a mental list of potential causes, generate a mental list of tests that will invalidate as many potential causes in the test’s execution, run through the tests from greatest potential causes to least, quickly validating the true cause… almost on a subconscious level, and often in seconds.
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I also have complete confidence in my ability to fully satisfy a woman sexually.
Same here. Not knowing a bit of French, German, Italian, Spainish, what-have-you, I can usually read the passage the way it was meant to be read. What it says, however, I have no idea. Now, if it’s written in a non-latin alphabet…then I’m screwed…but if you translate it phonetically, then I can reasd it (which is still hard, cause some sounds from certain languages actually translate into a different letter…but keep the original sound…I’m still trying to figure out why.)
