What are you absolute rubbish at? It needs to be a skill that 99 random people can do competently, but you feel like you’ll be at or near the bottom if it were a competitive event.
Me… cracking eggs. We got people cracking eggs two at a time, one in each hand, tap and open, like some short order professional. Then you have me. I tap the egg, then I tap it again, then I hold it with two hands and stick my thumb into the hole and hope I don’t get any shell or have a broken yolk. Maybe I tap it a third time if it’s being squirrelly.
It’s embarrassing, I usually pride myself at being competent, having skills, doing things right, if not necessarily artistically. I get how things work, except these damn eggs.
I suppose if I spent 5 minutes on each item I could get a reasonably nice looking folded shirt, but I don’t have that kind of time nor level of patience.
As it is, I do a quick fold-in-mid-air-flop-it-down-on-the-bed maneuver that results in an, at best, below-average fold.
Putting things together, maybe. I’m pretty bad at it; my mechanical reasoning and spatial relations skills are abysmal. Telling if someone is attracted to me, presuming they don’t tell me directly like Ms. P did.
Ditto! I can do other artistic endeavors, but not this.
Also, to my lifelong regret, I can’t whistle a note. My ex-husband is an excellent whistler, and not shy about doing it in public. More than once, people stopped him and asked him if he was a professional whistler. I can’t whistle to save my life.
I guess it’s likely that I’m not the only one in 100 who can’t whistle, but I bet I can’t whistle better than they can’t whistle.
I share some of your frailties. I can’t fold laundry well. My stack of t-shirts on laundry day looks like they were folded by a blind, one-armed, drunk chimp. I can’t sing. I don’t care that I can’t sing, because I still do, but I pity anyone who has to hear it. I can’t art. Of any kind. While my wife and younger offspring are professional artists (in that they’ve done it for money), I’m the King of Stick Figures.
Here’s the kicker: I can’t fish. I try. I go fishing a lot. I have tons of fancy gear. I watch videos where people actually catch fish, and I try to copy them. And yet there I am, on the bank, line in the water, catching nothing. I don’t mind it much, because I do enjoy being outdoors, on the water, just enjoying the view. I like to watch the eagles soaring over the lake, squirrels running to and fro, and ducks paddling by. But it sure would be nice to catch something. I’m not completely hapless, but for the amount of effort I put into it, I should be bringing home a lot more than I do. Oh well. It’s called fishing, not catching.
Gardening.
(I’m not interested in doing it and have hired a professional to look after mine!)
Once my grandmother asked me to tidy her small front garden. I pulled up about half the stuff, leaving the ones that ‘looked nice’ to me.
It transpired that I had removed all her plants and left only weeds.
Filling out forms and following instructions, especially verbal instructions.
I have a love/hate relationship with forms, because while a well-designed form is a relief as far as structured instructions, a poorly designed form is a nightmare. Labels that could mean anything, fields that sound important but aren’t even necessary, form used for more than one use case, forms with confusing ordering, tiny blocks that can’t possibly be written in, forms that must be filled in ink (no errors).
There’s got to be some neurological explanation for this. First day of Army boot camp I spent most of my time doing pushups as I ruined one form after another to the point where a small crowd of drill sergeants was watching in fascination to see which would be exhausted first, me, or the stack of extra forms.
I’m there with you, EnglishGrey, re drawing. My wife is quite artistic and also does many crafts (e.g., stained glass, hand painted decorations), but I’m barely able to draw stick men/women. (You don’t want to know how I differentiate between the two.) I can’t even trace anything. Furthermore, my idea of aesthetics is symmetry. Need to hang three paintings? No problem. Perfectly spaced at 1/4 the width of the wall and each exactly the same distance from the ceiling.
I’m decent at most anything mentioned above, other than the Ishihara color blindness test. I’m red/green deficient and I can’t see any of those stupid numbers. I also have a hard time seeing the reds in changing leaves in the fall unless it’s a tree that is standing alone with no green trees behind it.
Waterski. I tried it twice — about five attempts to “get up” each time — and I couldn’t do it, at all.
(Another possible one is “being able to sleep past 6:00 AM when it’s really important to get at least another hour of sleep,” but I think I share this limitation with about 5% of humanity, maybe even 10%. Point is, I wake up at 6:00 — or earlier — every day of my long life. Doesn’t matter if I got to sleep at 9:00 PM, or at 5:59 AM. I can’t begin to tell you how much this has sucked, and had affected my life.)
