Ask Lemmy

Driving without touching my phone.

Navigating UIs on PCs, Smartphones, Ticket Machines etc.

Basic hygiene, sadly

Explaining difficult technical concepts to laypeople. Just gotta find the correct analogy.

Being able to see through fake people's masks. Like, people who appear nice and friendly on the surface, but are narcissistic snakes who will destroy you to benefit themselves. The people who everyone will swear "oh, they aren't like that."

It's so obvious to my wife and I, possibly because we're on the spectrum, but no one else sees it until one of us lays out all the supporting evidence that they are in fact like that.

Popping their ears. I can "pop" my ears by opening my eustachian tubes on demand. I can even hold them open if I want to. Apparently a lot of people can't do that.

Spatial awareness.

I was in gymnastics as a kid, so built up a strong sense of balance and where my arms and legs are in relation to the stuff around me.

Computers just work around me. Steady the software and programs. I’m not in the tech or it field. I’m in retail management.

The amount of times people call me over only to say “well now it’s working but before it took me to some other screen”

“Glad I could help”

Not engaging with other humans. Whether in person or online, I simply don't feel like talking to people is necessary.

Will I do it? Sure. It's fine. But the difference is that I can go weeks without speaking to someone else - and frequently do since I'm disabled and a bit of a shut-in. However, it seems to really bother people to not have others with which to speak. I've never understood this.

Being isolated. It's always confused me how much people complain about loneliness. I genuinely don't think I have ever felt that emotion before.

Fixing things. Repair. Assembly. Construction. Diagnosis. It always surprises me how many people are incapable of understanding how something works or what needs done to repair it.

From engines to furnaces to plumbing, computers, electronics, whatever, I do it all myself. And it's not even remotely connected to me career. Repairmen hate me!

cutting off toxic people

Getting up when the alarm rings
Not touching my savings
Paraller/reverse parking
Finding joy in mundane little things

Being happy by myself.

Not judging other people. Partly, I'm just quite easy going, partly I've had enough personal history of making mistakes to understand that people often have others reasons for their actions. But mostly I just don't see the point in wasting headspace caring about someone's appearance, opinion or behaviour.

But I feel like I'm constantly hearing people bitching, moaning and picking at other people. There are situations where you need to take a decision about something (particularly if you're in a position of responsibility or authority) but most of the time there seems very little point in being judgemental about someone.

Before every 3rd annual review I set out getting competitive wages from competitors to bring to my review for my current employer to match or else I accept the competing offer and my current employer can use my annual review as my 2 week notice.

Has worked 5 out of 5 times accross 3 different companies over my 20 year work span.

Answering completely random questions without any context and/or reason.

I have a good imagination. After meeting people with aphantasia it seems I have an exceptional ability to call to mind sights, smells, sensations, sounds, and simulate the interactions they would have entirely in my mind. I can imagine a different set of curtains on the wall and tell you if it would clash with your paint, and I can taste a spoonful of a soup and go through a mental library of tastes and combine it with more salt, onion, wine etc and make a suggestion based on what "tasted" the best. I thought everyone could do it but some people don't have a "mind's eye" at all. Some people only can see in their imaginations, not smell or taste or hear etc.

Not being on my phone at work.

Remembering long passwords. We're talking in the 30-40 character ballpark. And I still can't remember people's names.

Cold turkeying stuff. It's not a superpower level but I can quit most stuff then and there without thinking about it again.

Doing basic research on the people I vote for.

I can stop hiccups the moment I notice I have them, usually after the second hiccup. It started as a conscious effort to change the breathing rhythm through diaphragmatic breathing, now is almost like a reflex action.

Actually getting annoyed by ads to the point I do what I can to block them. I work with IT and yet a good number of my coworkers don't use any adblock at fucking all

Spatial awareness/reasoning. How far things are, where are we relative to this landmark, which direction are we headed, how to account for the moving shadows when choosing a place to settle down at the beach, and so on and so forth. It seems like people around me are utterly lost in space

Waking up early.

It’s the fastest way to a cup of coffee

Believing people generally know what theyre doing. I get quite annoyed when I find out that people who are above me in the ladder dont have a clue what theyre doing.

Plumbing. I'm not a plumber and I'm not particularly good at it, but it's one of those things that most people won't even consider looking at.

Also, 3D visualization. I had a carpenter do the gutters on my house and I explicitly told him that the reason I didn't do them myself was that the eaves are slanted inwards so that the slope on the gutters would cause the gutters to go inwards when it goes downwards, and I was unsure what best practise was for that case, where to get the proper hangers for this or if we'd need to put a vertical board up first in order to make it work. He assured me that it'd be fine, having done many gutters before. When I got home, he had put ordinary hangers right on the slanted eaves, and the gutters were halfway under the roof at one end. He stood there scratching his head and tried to argue that the wall of the house was not straight, because he could simply not see any other reason for it to do that.

I can do an oil & filter(s) change and or a brake job on most normal cars pretty easy. Many people I know would have trouble with these.

Public speaking. I just can't get my head around the fact that a crowd is composed of real, individual people. It just looks like an impersonal, lifeless blob to me, so I have no trouble performing in front of it.

Climbing, I see a path and just take it. Pretty crazy how many people are afraid of heights. I've been climbing towers for over 20 years and have seen a lot of people not make it through the day.

I'm really good at finding flaws in things. It's not that I'm trying, I guess I just use things differently. A colleague of mine told me I should be a tester for product development to help find the problems when I asked him why some software worked the way it did. He just said, "I don't do it that way."

Consequently, I'm excellent at writing manuals because I always write them in such a way that no one will make the mistakes I did. The real bummer is I HATE WRITING MANUALS.

Executive function.

I don't know but it seems like a lot of people around me are just in a haze. Probably some of it is ADHD.

I get hit and screamed at a lot…just as a part of my job, and it doesn’t seem to phase me other than the mild inconveniences of injury. I’m sure my brain is a bit wonky. I do take summers off, and I get so bored.