Menus. I go to a restaurant and there is a list of 10 or 100 things, I don’t know what to order. Sometimes I can’t even read the menu, and there are no pictures?
Taxes. I don’t know why, because I’m actually good at maths, but when anyone tries to explain taxes, my brain turns into that scene from The Simpsons where Homer is trying to give Lisa his undivided attention and all that’s going on in his brain is a monkey playing the cymbals.
My accountant occasionally tries to explain something to me, and while he’s explaining it I understand every single word, but then I hang up the phone and my husband says, ‘So what did Accountant say?’ and all I can come up with is < monkey playing cymbals >.
It’s actually ‘whoever’ 
I handle most money matters at our house and am pretty good at it. Bills, loans, investments, 401Ks, mortgages, taxes, etc.
The one thing that I can’t wrap my head around and drives me into a rage however is health insurance. My wife has to handle all of it because I surely can’t. Deductibles, co-pays, in network or out, flex spending accounts, annual limits, premiums, etc. etc. It all makes my head spin. It makes me fear having to go to a doctor or a hospital cause somewhere along the line I’m going to screw up and they’re going to tell me “You were supposed to go to X, not Z, you’re not covered for Z. Now you owe them your life savings you big dummy.”
I have a terrible time remembering peoples’ names when I’m introduced. I have better luck if I’ve heard their names ahead of time.
I’m also terrible at putting together a “look” whether it’s clothing, decorating, or landscaping. I can’t visualize the end result, and inevitably, I end up disappointed. I know what I like, I just can’t seem to see the way there. It’s maddening.
At least once a week I stand outside my house after work and click my car key at the house, then try the door. It never fails that I’m surprised it didn’t unlock. Why I keep having to repeat this same stupid mistake, I don’t know. I plead excessive tiredness at the end of a working day.
Music. My husband and all my children are all very musical. They have lovely voices and can sing in tune. They learn instruments so quickly that they all play more than one. (family record is nine, although some of those are at an intermediate level.) I spent four years as a teen trying to play the piano and had to quit because I could not get my fingers to do different things at the same time. Which is weird because I can type quite quickly. I can’t sing without sounding like a scared goat. I can speak pretty knowledgeably on the subject, though, just because I have spent decades being surrounded by musicians.
Sports. Can’t play 'em, can’t watch 'em. Not that I want to.
Well, except that I do understand about 95% of baseball.
I don’t even care about the Cavs.
I swear to og, you could ask me someone’s name 5 seconds after we’ve been introduced and I would draw a blank.
Faces, too. I meet a ton of folks through my work who (whom? here we go again) I might run into out in the wild. They say, “Hey, Mustard!” like I’m their brother. I may have spent 3 hours with them last week. I used to act like I recognize them instantly. More recently I’ve been pretending I remember their face (I don’t) but asking for help with their name.
mmm
Approaching women and dating, but I’m married and don’t have to worry about that anymore. Math if it’s algebra or higher. Anything mechanical.
Math mainly. I can add up, multiply, long division in my head no trouble. But algebra and beyond is right out. If it’s got letters instead of numbers in it, I’m just stumped as anything. I dropped out of community college after failing 3 times at the remedial algebra course, which dropped my gpa low enough that they wouldn’t give me anymore loans. I really regret that because I wanted to go into the computer science program.
My other thing is draw. I can just about manage to draw a stickman without making him too crooked. You want to give him a little hat or make him look like he’s moving? Sorry, you’re on your own pal.
I was, throughout my youth, a quite successful athlete. I have a very natural affinity for angles (which is why I was an almost transcendentally great goaltender relative to my age group before a series of injuries) and spatial processing in general…
But I cannot, under any circumstances, be trusted behind the wheel of a car. It’s as if any ability I have in terms of spatial processing vanishes the instant I occupy the driver’s seat - to the point where I have simply acknowledged that I am too dangerously incompetent of a driver to inflict on others and resigned myself to taking public transportation/a bike/taxis/anything that does not involve me personally driving for the rest of my life.
Remembering names. I’m terrible at retaining the names of people I’ve been around for a long time. Church is one good example. But I’m working on it, trying to drill into my head a couple names a week from the photo directory. There are folks in the library I have been around for years, I know their faces but not their names.
Cut yourself some slack, Z; hooking up a dryer to the outside world is a monkeyf&%# of the first order: The spring clamps work in some dimension other than our physical three; the dryer flange where you connect the vent hose is, what, maybe an inch?; you’re supposed to use as short a length of VH as possible to avoid lint build-up which can cause a fire–the shorter the length, the harder to work behind the so-and-so, and if you’re not careful when you go to trim the VH, it’ll unravel or split or try to strangle you; working behind the dryer, you have to kneel or sit to hook up the VH–fun, fun, fun climbing over the top; then you have to push the dryer back as far against the wall as you can without crimping/kinking the VH (inside the teeny utility closet); OOPS! forgot to plug it in, pull it back out of the UC; how the hell do you connect the 4-lead power cord to the sucker?; Gas hook-up? Auuuughhhhhhh! And the door opens the wrong way!
Did I forget anything?
Feeling any better?
(Crap, didn’t level the durn thing.)
I’m dumb with “pop culture.” Paty Kerry? Hannah Nebraska? I’unno.
Also awful with names. I can remember your phone number, your regular drink at a bar or restaurant, and the room number you had the last time you stayed at our hotel*. But I don’t call people honey, dear, and sweetie because I’m a middle aged southern woman. I don’t know your name!
I also have something like face blindness when I see people “out of context.” I recognize the cashier at the grocery store, but I don’t recognize her at the park. Awkward sometimes, like running into the pharmacist at the PTA meeting: “Oh, I didn’t recognize you without your drugs! Wait, that sounds wrong. I didn’t recognize you with your clothes. Dang it!”
I am also the world’s worst housekeeper. I just get too frustrated with the whole ordeal, especially when every job seems to be four times more complicated when the kids/dog/husband/etc. undo everything as soon as it’s done.
*My ability to remember numbers was my trick at the hotel. When a client who was already in house walked in the door, I’d pull up the room number. By the time they made it to the desk, I could greet them by name.
I’m too dumb to own a TV. But really, society, which of us is really dumb?
I’ll join the math bandwagon. I can do functional math - I can calculate a tip, for example - but anything beyond, say, fractions, and I’m lost. I even read a book for innumerate adults that promised to explain math, and started with simple addition…and I couldn’t follow it.
I regret it, too. I’m not proud of my innumeracy, and I don’t think that math is stupid, just because I can’t understand it. I’ve read enough popular science to know that math underlies pretty much everything, and holds mind-blowing, cosmic truths. Beauties, too. It’s frustrating - I know there’s a whole library of amazing stories and poetry as close as my laptop. But it’s in a language I can’t read.
I’m completely unmusical, as well, and I suspect these two things are related. Can’t dance, can’t sing, can’t carry a tune or follow a beat. That’s not just an opinion, either - I once took a battery of psychological tests that measured pitch discrimination and rhythm. I can tell that a cello is lower than a violin; but differences more subtle than that? Can’t tell 'em apart. Also, literally could not follow a beat. I once made a dance teacher quit in frustration.
Me, too…exactly.
Music. I don’t like it (any kind) and when people talk about keys and so forth it just sounds like some nonsense someone made up to me. They tried to teach us to read music in elementary school and that did not go well.
Did you read the OP or are you using some sort of text to voice converter?
This. (Except for the directions thing – I’m generally good at that…the exception being this:
Until recently, I would always get lost trying to exit a big parking lot – say, at a Target – and back onto the main street. I would always drive straight toward the street, realize there was no way to get on it there, then wander around.
Finally, I realized that big surface lots are designed so exits and entrances are along a slow “street” right next to the store building(s). You take that until you reach a transverse street connecting to the main street.
So, now when I’m done shopping, I get in my car and FORCE myself to counterintuitively drive AWAY from the main street, back toward the building, to start the exiting process.)