I can look at a page of printed text and my eyes are immediately drawn to every mistake. I never miss a single one.
I call it The Curse of the Editor’s Eye because it really isn’t a fun skill to have, considering the horrible state of written English in this country. The worst recent instance came when my son brought home a syllabus from his seventh-grade English class – I found more than a dozen easily noticed errors of spelling and usage, not to mention an entire section that had been copied into the syllabus twice.
It kills me that this woman has a job teaching English and I don’t.
I can do that too! Wow, I’m just picking other people’s talents, haha. But yeah, I code all of my stuff in Notepad because then I know what the code looks like, where any mistakes might be (there aren’t very many, though) and it’s not filled with extra code that isn’t really needed that HTML editors tend to stick in there.
My friends are constantly bugging me to troubleshoot their HTML when they’re having a problem. sighs
Oh, and I can diagnose a CSS problem instantly. And change out an alternator in a car with only a crescent wrench.
I know how to operate a mimeograph machine.
A couple of years back I got curious and did an Internet search. It is still possible to buy mimeograph supplies. Who the heck is still using those dinosaurs?? Maybe they’re still in use in Third-World countries.
I can peck at over 110 WPM, but I’m a full-time student and I refuse to take night classes (I’m freakin’ 20! Plus I can’t focus on equations at night), so that doesn’t factor in for me.
I’m really good at showing up right on time or late. I’m better at showing up on time for work than for school, at least, but those are skills I wish I didn’t have.
That last part (working in the lock) is key, if you’ll pardon my verbiage. Nobody can seem to get that part right.
Sure, but do you use a micropipette to do it?
I can list the top 10 most populated cities (not metro areas) in the US in order, and place most of the top 50 within five places or 50,000 population, all off the top of my head. I’ve never had a job that used that skill.
I used to spend all day, every day writing the on-screen help text for applications written for the AS/400 platform (yeah, it was years ago). I got up to world record speeds at this, and was so fast that it was almost as if the stuff was just hatching by magic. I once started on a project that everyone else in the team had been working on for 3 months already. There were serious concerns as to whether I’d ever be able to catch up. I ‘caught up’ within the first 28 days on the job.
I know just about everything there is to know about the Ventura desk top publishing programme. Hence my annoyance that it is more or less 100% extinct.
In my current job, as a professional magician, I can tell all sorts of things about cards that would be useless to anyone else but are kinda useful to me and others in my trade.
My wife teaches in a relatively well-off suburban school district. They still use mimeos in many cases because they’re cheaper than photocopying.
Speaking of useless skills, my wife can still use proportional spacing on an IBM Executive typewriter. There’s a lot less call for that than there used to be.
I can roll a diaper on, clothe, and groom an 80 year old woman who is trying to scratch my eyes out.
I can make a perfect batch of popcorn in any machine, without measuring.
I can groom a Shih Tzu that is also trying to scratch my eyes out.
Consequently I can also clean its anal glands.
I can scoop a perfectly round ice cream cone first try, every time.
I can make twenty Sco Cones in a row without freezing the ice in the machine, everyone else I worked with always got in clogged and I never understood that.
I can draw blood out of anything–any species, any time, anywhere.
I can recite the top five or six ingredients of most major and many not-so-major brands of dry dog food.
I can spot a diabetic rat at twenty paces. I can also convince any rat to pee enough for a UA in under five seconds.
I can feed, water, and thoroughly clean the cage of a rhesus macaque without once getting closer than about six feet–body fluid range. Look at the teeth on that sucker!
Hmm, maybe I should include some of this on my resume?
I have this same skill and, you’re right, it isn’t very enjoyable. I am not an editor and never have been an editor, but it did come in handy when my job involved creating or improving peoples’ resumes.
Which reminds me, I can create a resume (and a truthful one at that) for anyone, no matter how limited their skills or job experience.
I have the same ability as Chef Troy and lorene . It’s gotten so bad that my friends and cow-orkers know to bring a pen with them so I can correct mistakes (or should I say, miss steaks).
I can also figure out what is wrong with cow-orkers email tools before the helpdesk gets there (it’s really a skill, because they’re very good and show up in 15 minutes.) I can also enter formulas into Excel without having to look them up.
I can tell you what the difference is in the poundage of paper by just looking at a single sheet, and can also find the most obscure gift to give for the secret santa (so far: 2 can beer helmet, a hat from uselessknowledge.com proclaiming one to be a Trivia God, Schoolhouse Rock box set before the internet made it easy to find.)
I can troubleshoot pretty much any MS Office application*, because I’ve been using the bloated shite for about 12 years. I can also tell when it’s time to give up because there’s nothing that can be done for the file.
My coworkers know this, which makes for a somewhat interrupted working day.
*E.g. depending on how you import graphics into Powerpoint, the application will store them either as a bitmap or the original filetype, which can make a vast difference to the size of the file. I am the only one at work who has this knowledge, or has the lameness to retain it.
I can correctly transcribe a series of two-digit or three-digit numbers that one person is reading to me, at the same time that another person is reading an unrelated series of numbers over a microphone. I can get behind by about four or five numbers in the transcription and still be able to proceed and catch up without stopping the reader. (I used to scrutineer dance competitions.)
I can write Globorotalia truncatulinoides (and many other planktonic fauna) backwards or forwards with a Leroy lettering set. This was useful 30 years ago.
