I can fold standard letter-sized paper into thirds. Exactly, to within a gnat’s ass. Without thinking about it. It’s perfect for sticking letters in envelopes, which admittedly I don’t do very often at work, and not good for much else.
Every time I do so, I look at the page and say, “I’ve been working in an office toooo long.”
When I was working in an engraving shop I could guess the size of print to about 0.05 inches. (That doesn’t come in handy anywhere else, I tell you.) I can gauge the size of something hand-sized (such as a name badge) to within a quarter of an inch, but I’m terrible at distances over 12 inches.
Who else has acquired useless job skills like these?
I hunt and peck at 50 words a minute.
I can copy from an A4 original onto US letter-sized paper.
I arrive at work on time.
I have a pleasant phone voice.
All of these have caused me to get front-desk temp work that I otherwise would have been able to avoid, since I’d rather work in the warehouse.
I can tell the size bra a woman’s wearing from 100 paces and also tell what size she should be wearing. I used to be a bra-measuring lady in a clothes store. I used to look at breasts and think “Wheee, boobies!”. I now think “Go up a cup, down four inches and get more support or your norks will be down to your knees in 5 years”. It was more fun before.
Sadly the store wouldn’t let me test for bra size by grabbing a boob in each hand and saying “Ooh, feels like you’re about a C”, so it wasn’t as much fun as it sounds.
Do you get a warning for that? Or is it immediate dismissal?.. Either way, I would still like your job… Measuring boobs all day sounds much more fun than what I do now…
I know how to plug in a phone to a modular jack… and I get paid for it.
My boss called me up the other day saying that a phone in one of our offices was not working and that I should bring my diagnostic equipment so I could trace the line. When I got there, I found the phone was not plugged into the modular jack.
Yes, I’m gonig to rib my boss about this for as long as we both work here.
I can center things by eye extremely well. I once had a customer get upset with me because I wasn’t measuring to center a plate on a large wooden album. He was an incredibly conceited, bossy man, used to bullying people about. After I assured him I knew what I was doing and attached the plate, he insisted on measuring…and had to grudgingly admit I had done it right.
I could memorize the position of hundreds of bottles of craft paint, and direct a customer to them…(Ruby Red Scribble? Third row down, fourth from the left…) And then there were the beads, and the jewelry findings… I was so relieved when I took my current job because there were only hundreds of products to remember, not thousands.
I don’t suppose you could recommend a good source for replacement exterior door locks/hardware for a building dating to the late 1800’s, could you?
(A favorite client of mine has their office in an beautiful convetred house, circa 1893 I believe. Door knob falls off in your hand every time you open or shut the door, due to an internal mechanism problem of some sort. I would love to gift them with something to fix it)
My useless office superpower is negative. I can’t remember what any acronym means. When I high-paid consultant starts to deliver a PowerPoint presentation loaded with phrases like BMP and ROI, I’m always the one person in the room who can be counted on to say, "Excuse me, but what is this “SAP”? (Yeah, Sausage Creature I’m talkin’ to you!). This saves anywhere from one other person to everyone else in the meeting from looking like idiots.
Needless to say, I’m asked to sit in on a lot of meetings.
I can weed out crab and quack grass from little bluestem, sideoats and blue grama. Well, lots and lots of other weed and good grasses are in the mix, too, but those are the biggies this week.
I can tell seedling plants apart in a garden with umpteen varieties of native plants and umpteen more weeds.
(Hope this wasn’t just for office skills - I avoid honing those at all costs.)
I’ve been out of the hardware business for over 6 years.
I’m still known as Goddess_of_Locks on a blog I wrote a couple years back, and on a couple other message boards. I’m thinking of changing my user name to that.
I can figure out the best place to put a trap and the best bait to put in it to get a feral cat to go into the trap. You just have to think like a cat.
