I can identify a very wide range of garden, wild or crop plants glimpsed from a moving car.
I can catch items midair when they fall off tabletops, benchs, etc. I don’t even think about it. Even midconversation, I can reach out and snag a falling book or spoon or whatever before it hits the ground.
This skill would be useful, except that it’s undiscriminating. I’ve caught knives by the blade before. Ouch.
<<< I can wake up exactly one minute before the alarm goes off. No matter what time I set it for or how many hours of sleep I get, I almost always wake up right before the alarm goes off. >>>
I can do this to. It’s quite freaky. I also have the ability (and it only ever happens sometimes without my trying) to make myself get up at the exact same time every morning, but not just the time I set my alarm too; some weird time, say, 6:18. When this starts happening I’ll wake up at that exact time for three days or maybe more.
I can have arguments in my head. Fully-fledged debates. I have no idea how normal this is, but sometimes it’s just freaky how involved I can get fighting with myself.
I can make myself happy, without fail - so long as I want to. I did it just today when I was in an absolute FOUL of a mood. For a while I knew that I should stop being so angry but I just didn’t want to that badly, and after a while, I said in my head, ‘ENOUGH IS ENOUGH! Now start being happy!’ so I concentrated on some things which never fail to make me happy, and it worked. Utterly. And it lasted for several hours and I’ve not yet got anywhere near that angry.
I never fail to attract the oldest, drunkest man in the bar. All of my friends can attest. It usually pisses them off to the point of leaving because I can’t ever get rid of the old, drunk men. If I go to the bathroom and never come back, they find me. I even had one guy wander into the next bar I’d gone to and find me there. Worse than usless power.
My magical ability is to get my bosses to leave the company I work for, usually within an average of three months.
A summary follows…
Small Engineering Company: Get hired, boss transfers to Greenville, SC three months later. Get laid off during next boss’ regime (and three months after my layoff, next boss gets booted).
Major Retail HQ: Get hired, boss gets canned in six months. Have no boss for about a year (which was wonderful).
Small Engineering Company #2: Get hired, boss gets sacked two weeks later. New boss is in office about thirty miles away, which keeps him safe from my diabolical power.
Large Engineering Company: Get hired. First boss quits in four months. Second boss comes on board, transfers to St. Louis in three months. Current boss seems strangely immune to the curse.
Apparently, within a company, I am mad, bad, and dangerous to know.
(And a useful power of mine: finding parking spots. Crowded neighborhood, full parking garage, doesn’t matter – I can find a spot just about anywhere. Only works when I’m by myself. If I’ve got someone else in the car, I’m powerless.)
No, no. Your mother is a fish.
As to the OP, I have the ablility to instantly lose at cards when money is involved. Even if I’m playing with friends for pennies. And I can also take a nap and wake up at a prespecified time. I am so terrified of using up this power that I hardly ever use it, though. Usually only when there’s no alarm clock around.
Give me a cord - any cord - and in mere moments it will be a tangled mess. If there’s no other cord around to tangle it with, I’ll simply tangle it with itself. For this reason, I am forbidden to touch the Christmas lights.
Have a comic book you hate? Have me start reading it regularly! There’s no faster way to get a book cancelled or to simply have it stop coming out than to get me to climb on board. My recent victims are Electropolis, Astro City, and The Authority.
Ohhhh, I can tell myself when I have to wake up and BANG, I wake up at that predetermined time.
Mr. Ujest and I can always find each other no matter what mall, event, outing we go too if we split up. We have this inner sensor with each other. I always know when he is about to call on the phone.
There isn’t one pair of socks that have come into our house that I haven’t lost it’s mate. It’s like they divide and run away.
If there is a clean kitchen counter or flat surface in this house *it will be covered with the flotsam of my life in the blink of an eye *. This use to drive me absolutely nuts until I realized that *All Flat Surfaces Must Be Covered With Paper *
Every real job I’ve ever held the company has ended up going out of business within two years of me quitting. Don’t blame me for Enron…
I have amazing Physhic ( how in the hell do you spell that word?) to predict the dumb things people will do, say, act out and tell Mr. Ujest this and he always says, " Oh, you’re just being negative." Lo and Behold, I am nearly always right.
Outside of Physhcic, I am a great speler. 
I can grow an entire 2000 sq. ft veggie garden from seed.
I am a walking library of useless knowledge, so much so, that friends and family say I should go on a game show.
I have voice recognition in my head. It use to scare the living snot out of clients who I hadn’t heard from in years. " Hey Shirley."
“Hey, Bob…long time no talk.” “Holy shit…It’s been three years.”
I, too, have instant movie recognition for most movies. And my mental hard drive is just crammed with useless Movie Information. ( Though I am a bit rusty since having kids. Movies are just not the focal point of my life any more.)
I can kill any thread.
Shirley: But not today.
I am blessed with the ability to untangle anything you give me: rope, string, dental floss, complicated necklace chains. I am the only one trusted to do the Christmas lights because I can extract them intact from the shoebox into which they were casually tossed the previous year.
I have the ability to read, comprehend, translate and explain US federal gummit regulations.
I cal also fry chicken in the nude and not get splashed by hot grease. Well, the bf was amazed by this talent.
But only if you stand in a line other than the one I’m in. You see, whichever checkout lane I choose instantly becomes the slowest in the entire store.
I swear, I have watched ten people purhcase their groceries and leave via the lane I almost chose. All the while, I’m stuck behind the person who (choose one):
[ul]
[li]Is paying for a week’s worth of groceries with loose change[/li][li]Is attempting to use a third-party foreign check made out for $500 over the purchase price[/li][li]Swears she has a coupon for 10 cents off that bottle of mustard in her purse somewhere. Of course, said purse contains enough loose coupons to fill three Sunday papers[/li][li]Needs to speak to manager right now about how that pack of gum was four cents cheaper last week[/li][li]Realizes that she mistakenly picked up extra chunky peanut butter instead of super chunky, and could the clerk just hold on a minute while she runs back and gets the right kind[/li][li]Insists that they could buy Marlboros, Budweiser, and Twizzlers with food stamps last time they came in[/li][li]Pays by check and has to balance the checkbook before he’ll even write out the check for this purchase[/li][li]Apparently misunderstood the ‘Five Items or Fewer’ sign to mean ‘Five Food Groups or Fewer’ and gets away with it[/li][/ul]
I could go on. God help me, I really could. I’d change lanes, but my powers would just kick in for that lane. When my wife and I go shopping, it becomes my job to choose a checkout lane to stand in. She can’t know for sure which of the remaing lanes will be the fastest, but she damn sure knows which will be the slowest.
Up until the onset of my mid-twenties, I had always been able to drop into a full split without stretching—just BAM! on the ground. Loved to make my male friends flinch with that one.
My other great power: can’t feel bee/yellowjacket stings. They do itch mildly after a few minutes, but I don’t feel any pain when the sting happens.
Like Seven, you can put me in any room of people and the one who’s least mentally stable will be immediately drawn to me…
As children and teenagers, I could do nothing to scare my kids. Now that they are adults, I can make them quake in their shoes with a stare.
Place me in a boat, fishing pole in hand, and place me in any body of water. I will be of no threat to the fish population. In about 25 attempts to catch fish the past 3 years, I have been skunked each and every time. My power can even rub off on those I am fishing with. They hate my power.
I have the ability to charm just about every baby I have ever met, sometimes to the point that they cry when I give them back to their moms and dads. There are few children that can resist this awesome power.
I posess the Voice of Doom[sub]tm[/sub] which can make those same small children cry uncontrollably, it is a great responsibility and a power that must be used with great caution. It works great with annoying telemarketers too.
I can also make owies magically disappear.
I can cook in more rooms than just the kitchen.
I do laundry and windows.
I put the toilet seat down.
And I have a twelve inch penis. Okay… not really… but that phrase always makes Lola smile.
I have the power to cloud people’s minds.
All I have to do is to start to explain something and in no time a glazed look comes over their eyes and the head starts to nod and clearly they have no idea what I am saying. It is an awesome power, but I try to use it carefully and only for good.
See, your eyes stared to glaze!
TV
I am extremely good at misjudging when I should step off the escalator. You’d think I’d be used to it, because I take the escalator about twice a day, but somehow I still haven’t got it worked out. I walk up the steps, and my last step at the top is always a mistake because I get tossed onto the landing before I’m ready. Very disconcerting.
And another: I can often predict which re-run episode of a TV show will be on. This one isn’t all that reliable, but it works too often to be coincidence. Oddly, it’s not a purposeful thing. What happens is that sometime during the day, a line or scene from a particular episode will come into my head, and that very evening, I’ll switch on the TV, and there will be the same episode. Creepy.
I have one gonzo psychic power: I can make people stop hiccuping. The power works about 85 percent of the time. (actually, it’s more psychological than psychic… anyone can do it.)
Here’s how it works: When the person hiccups, I immediately hold up two one-dollar bills and say, “If you can hiccup again, I’ll give you two bucks.” then I gaze at them quietly, holding the money where they can see it. As soon as they start trying to hiccup, the fit almost always deserts them.
I’ve found that offering more than two dollars doesn’t increase the effectiveness, but offering less doesn’t work. And you have to be willing to pay up if they do hiccup again, or the spell will be broken with that person and it won’t work on them ever again.
[minor hijack]
Ah, Inky-, you are one of the lucky ones. My golden retrievers are defective - golden, yes, retrievers, no. The boy will chase after a stick or a tennis ball, but when he gets to it he just stands there wagging his tail and looking goofy, or alternatively, buries it. And the girl has never been seen to pick up anything in her mouth that wasn’t food. When they greet me at the door, their attitude is “Hello!! Hello!! I love you so much that I have to shed white fluff all over your black pants and slobber on your shirt!”
I have dreams of taking my dogs to the beach and throwing sticks into the water for them to fetch. If your dogs will do this, I’m deeply envious.
[/minor hijack]
As for the OP, my amazing, and, in fact, very useful power is to park illegally without getting a ticket. I’ve been parking without paying for the best part of a year in the main carpark at uni, and got my first ticket last week. And today I parked for two hours in a pay carpark in town without paying, and didn’t get caught.
Oh, and my father can throw teabags over his shoulder and land them in the cup nine times out of ten, which is pretty cool.
I have the amazing power to turn off street lights. It even works when I’m driving in the car.
I also have the somewhat less amazing, or amusing, power to turn stoplights red. It works about 80% of the time. I am not making this up.
I also have the same power as STARK to pick the checkout line where someone is trying to cash a two-party check on the Bank of Guam. Without ID. (okay, I made up the part about Guam)
I can do this with both hips too, but I consider it useful.