What's your useless skill?

I know we’re all here for the LOLs, but just a quick reminder: it’s ok to enjoy things without being able to monetize them.
- In this economy?!
  
  My bills have bills to pay!
- Very wise.
  Do you have a Patreon?
- While of course it is, also if you have natural talent for something and enjoy it then monitizing it means you you might be able to do a job you enjoy.
- Especially when that skill is "remember a face."

I think recognizing a person by hearing them once would be useful as:
spy
bouncer
detective
headhunter
diplomat
- Also just for any kind of sales, honestly. I’m always surprised that regular customers at my bakery like being recognized, but they generally do. I was once in the Taco Bell drive through and the cashier asked me how I get my hair to grow so quickly (I grow it out until it’s long enough to donate, then chop it off and start anew), which implied a very long term recognition, so I stopped going to tb for a few months, because I hated the idea of being observed. I’m autistic and not especially social, though, so I can understand that I’m the outlier here.
  
  I think it's very context dependent.
  Pharmacists often recognize me and I'd rather they didn't. But I get it. I'm there almost every week for something.
  My favorite bubble tea place now recognizes the car I drive so they will prepare my tea as I'm parking and it's ready by the time I get to the counter. I did tell them that on occasion I'll order something different but I appreciated it nonetheless.
  
  I like it when I'm remembered because it means that I was worth remembering.
  
  People recognize my husband (visual disability) and my twin (distinct dress style) around and it makes me so fucking uncomfortable when they do. Especially now here in the us. Please don't remember us. Forget us and leave us alone. But they act like I'm an asshole for being super uncomfortable with people just fucking coming up and being all "oh you're from x place!" cause also just because they recognize someone doesn't mean you comment on that?? I was taught that was rude as fuck?? You also don't know us at all????
  
  I would be proud of being recognized at a local bakery, and similarly uncomfortable being recognized at a Taco Bell.

It's a sign of intelligence to be able to "connect the dots", so arguably this is a transferable skill.
- Put OP on monitoring CCTV.
  
  "Enhance, OP! Enhance!"
  
  I did that for a while, and I’ll be exaggerating my uselessness but here goes.
  “No, that can’t be him. See, the man who did the robbery was wearing a pair of pantyhose on his face. This guy has no such article of clothing on his face. His friend had on a ski mask, I don’t see a ski mask on this man’s face. Yeah, they’re wearing the same shoes but what about the face coverings, hmmmmm?”
  
  "Hey, that guy stealing all our stuff was in Frasier!"

God forbid we have a piece of our lives that isn’t monetized for the grind.
- Well hey, if you monetize it whatever service you monetize on will just demonetize it without warning for no reason anyway.
  
  Why anyone would even start a YouTube channel right now is beyond me. Unless you're planning to go full Louis Rossman and DGAF.

My father was frustratingly difficult to watch movies with, because of this exact thing. He would pause the movie to explain that the actor on screen had been in some other obscure movie a decade ago. It was especially bad if two actors had previously worked in the same project, because then he would start listing off other cast and crew they had worked with in the past.
Okay, great, please press Play. I just want to watch the goddamned movie.
- Ah shit. I do this and I just assumed my kids were cool with it. Thank you for being the mirror I didn't know I needed.
  
  Your kids might appreciate it. Just ask.
  
  I'd be cool with discussing it afterwards. That kind of thing is really interesting to me. My dad doesn't know shit about fuck though.
- lmao My friends and I do this, but we do not pause the movie. We can keep track of what is happening, give obscure info, tell jokes, even, if it's necessary, we do pause the movie to go to youtube to watch some video because someone remembered see some similar scene or something. Maybe that is our useless skill
  
  I think you might have a very useful skill of actually finding good, compatible friends.
  
  Yeah you try this with me and I'll definitely pause the movie until y'all be quiet unless it's a trash fire type watch
- My wife and daughter do this a lot, but their version is to quietly look up the actors and then announce their results during a lull, so it works out fine. I just do it in my head so I'm like yeah I know, she was also in whatever with Val Kilmer.
  There are certain TV shows where you could spend the whole time figuring out who used to be in what - in the 80s Murder She Wrote featured just about every middle-tier actor from the 60s or 70s. Before that they were on The Love Boat. Seems like there must be a modern show full of 90s through 2010s actors but I don't know what it would be. Hey, there's Topanga!

I have the same addiction, but with voice actors.
- That's a niche skill I like it!
- I kinda have both. I have to know if that cardassian holographic doctor was someone in scrubs. And why do I recognize the chicken from the chicken ad in Bojack horseman and how is it not Terry Crews?
- They are all Troy Baker anyway xD

I can say the alphabet backwards, really fast. I also know all the digits of pi in ascending order
- Ascending order? So like, 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9?
  
  That is the joke, yes.
  
  No, like 0 0 0 0 0 .... 1 1 1 1 1 .... 2 2 2 2 ....
  and I forget the rest, but I'm pretty sure I know the last digit
- woah
- You almost got me there 😆
- i once was asked to recite the alphabet backwards for a dui stop. after the pig wanted to breathalyze me first and I told him "don't we have to do a little song and dance? (walk in a straight line).
  been practicing ever since.
  wait.. ALL the digits? fucking mastermind over here
- I dated a girl who could recite pi to a hundred places.
- Yeah, well I know all the digits of pi in base pi

I knew someone that worked at an Audi dealer that can recognize everyone's voice and associate their purchase.
I called him 4 years later to inquire about a new Audi and he asked me how my TT was treating me and if I was ready for a bigger car(I mentioned that I was going to start a family soon).
- Born politician right there. Seriously, some of the shittiest villains in politics would nonetheless wow you with how they can legitimately work an entire room full of people, remember names, make you feel special, etc.
  
  Honestly, if I was in the market in buying another car, I would love that kind of personalization.

My boring super power isn't something I can monetize, but it's useful regularly: being able to pick the best sized Tupperware container to put leftovers in.
- now find the lid
  
  Heh, my wife went through the drawer a few years ago and threw away all the containers that didn't have lids, and lids without containers. I was amazed at how many there were. Not sure how that happens. Must be with the missing socks.
- that's on the fly volume calculation. very useful for when you have to pack a truck.
  also helps if you have some Tetris experience. so def monetizeable
  
  Funny, I just had to help someone pack a house into one of those POD things and they ended up saying, "You're better at this, you say what goes where."
  I don't think I'm as good at it with really large volumes, but the storage container thing is pretty handy.
  
  I went to college with a guy who was paid very well for figuring out the most efficient way to load a freighter. This was before computers were in common use. Also, never bet money on a chess game with him.
- I'd like that skill!

No completely true. You can win gift cards at bar trivia.
I know this because, in college, I had to take Greek mythology to get an engineering degree. I can honestly say I've never used the Greek mythology knowledge anywhere but bar trivia.
- Reminds me of a story of a friend of mine.. She did her undergrad and masters in classics and archaeology. As part of her studies she participated in a summer dig on the island of Cyprus. She spent the summer working on remote archaeological sites in the rural countryside.
  Well one day she needed to go into town for something. She goes in to the only store in town, a tiny little grocery store. She finds what she's looking for then goes to check out. Suddenly, with horror, she realizes, "wait, I don't know how to talk to this guy. I can't speak modern Greek."
  So she attempts the next best thing. She tries to talk to the shopkeeper...in ancient Greek. She tried to have a random conversation with someone in ancient Greek in modern Cyprus.
  The shopkeeper looks at her like she has two heads, pauses for a moment, and says, in English, "lady, no one has talked like that here for two thousand years!"
- There have been few things in my life more satisfying than being in a room full of generally smart, knowledgeable people, and being the only one who knows the answer to a trivia question. It's happened a few times in my life, and usually it's about mythology.
  One time while scoring the round, the quizmaster was asking the questions aloud and letting the crowd shout back the correct answers. When it came to the Greek mythology question I was the only one who shouted, "Tartarus!" Someone in the back of the room shouted, "Nerd!" Later in the round he found me and apologized, but it didn't bother me.
  For my first baby shower we hired our quizmaster to host trivia. In the interest of fairness, our six person team was split across three of the teams. It ended in a three-way tie, and the tiebreaker was the name of Odin's horse. It was Sleipnir, which means "Slippy". Slippy the eight-legged horse. That one was especially satisfying.
  
  mythology.. isn't that a horse with 4 legs and 2 arms (the almighty centaur)?
- I think you could get more creative with your language, with that knowledge. If nothing else, reading the Bible (or catching the cliffs notes) and getting a firm understanding of 'The Classics' gives you an immense wealth of phrases and references to help illustrate your point that are so ingrained in Western culture and media that you're likely to strike more points with it than without.
  I'm still making my way through that herculean effort, that sisyphusian task. I struggled like Odysseus returning home to get through the Bible the first time, but once you get through all the parables and their Lot, there are some really interesting stories that make for easy metaphors and similes.
  
  And metaphors are useful because it makes language a bit more digestible and accessible to people who understand those metaphors.
  
  because stories they are.. lest you believe they're history events

My useless skill is software development ¯(ツ)/¯
- Oof.
- clearly you have a long road ahead of you if you still can't escape your backslashes lol
- Don't feel bad, I used to work as a writer.

writing code that doesn't need a browser to run on
- Oh man so much love went into crafting code for low end MP3 players in the Rockbox project, then everyone ended up carrying around smartphones with tons of compute and memory resource to waste
  
  I used rockbox on a recent holiday for my ipod 6g. It's always my go to for holidays so i don't need to use up my phone's battery
  
  Man I still use my iPod with rockbox. A terabyte of storage and a massive battery and I never have to worry about giving streaming revenue to pedo rapists like red hot chili peppers, or worry about rumors being true about pedo rapists like panic at the disco
  
  Rockbox was so cool. I had it on my SanDisk Sansa e250. It was so awesome. Better video format support, better interface. And it ran fucking DOOM.
- Preposterous! What can code run on if not a browser!
  
  most code from the before times, from the long-long-ago, actually didn't need a browser, and could fit on a floppy disk!

I have this same skill, but with voice actors.
- If it's an elf woman that ~~may or may not be particularly~~ is either extremely horny or ace, i have a pretty solid guess of the English voice actor...
- My SO can identify all actors by voice (she follows all films by ear because she's playing some kind of Candy Crush game — several of them, because she runs out of levels). And as a lot of them are foreign, and dubbed, she'll tell me that this was the guy that was doing the voice in (litany of roles).
  Of course I have to pick films accordingly. She's never seen Tenet.
- Me with anime
  Granted I watch mostly >decade old stuff dubs, so it's mostly the same 30 VAs in every show

IMDB used to have an amazing cross-search. You could put any combination of actor, crew, movie/show title and it would bring out common movies/shows.
- That sounds like it would be a pretty simple program to create a replacement for if IMDb’s data is scrapeable, but I don’t know anything about programming
  
  I'm sure some AI cuck will steal that idea and act like he's god for creating it with vibe coding.
  
  That sounds like it would be a pretty simple program [...] but I don’t know anything about programming
  As a programmer, that phrase tends to raise my blood pressure. But it depends on how they structure their data but since all the elements are already related, it should be easy to query them all together. I bet they've abandoned it more because the query UI is a bit dense for most. But nothing that could be replaced with a simple textbox that could take any combination of cast/crew/titles and find anything that matches the combination. But they might need to add some specific indexing that would use up additional resources.
- It used to have amazing discussion forums as well, fuck you amazon
  
  amazun, IMDB.. what do they have in common?
- That sounds cool I wonder why they stopped it
  
  I’m guessing Amazon bought them and dicked everything up.
  Guessing, I have no idea if that’s true but it would add up.

The actor who played Oscar in The Office also was in The Italian Job (Marc Walberg, Charlize Theron). He was the security guard for the rich guy (Edward Norton) and said maybe two lines while checking ID.
- The guy from Reno 911! and Curb Your Enthusiasm!? Holy shit, he really ended up doing alright for himself.

This goes beyond financial viability. For the sake of shared trivia amongst strangers, does anyone know the connection? I'm not very familiar with the former, but I'm fairly versed in Seinfeld.

I can build majority of flat pack furniture without the instructions, first time, every time.
- I'm in awe of you. Genuinely
- Do you have any leftover screws?
  
  Never! Unless they gave me too many...
  But seriously I don't use the self tappers or nails they give you as they awful, made of soft cheese.

Me, refusing to look up the straight answer online and trying to find the FRIENDS apartment only using the intro, going on Google Street View and finding it, before GeoguessR became a thing.
- Where is it? Share the link! :)
  
  Grove Street for life, homie.

I actually enjoy* fucking around with older-ish computers and making them kinda useful again
^* ^involves ^lots ^of ^cursing ^and ^groaning ^when ^things ^don't ^work ^and ^I ^have ^to ^troubleshoot ^or ^start ^over
- Narrator: "However, that Vic-20 would never be useful ever again, despite what he told himself."
- Its a good hobby. I have a 14 year old Iomega network drive that I loaded Debian onto. It will serve audio or samba shares without overloading the 256MB of memory

If you give me a pair of knipex snips, I can tell you the generic resin of a polymeric material by cutting it.
- I wonder whether I could stump you. The place where I work makes a couple of very niche polymers.
  
  commercially available performance materials
  Probably wouldn't do great with super obscure stuff that doesn't make it's way through my workplace but I'd probably do well with the top 25-30 most common generics that probably represent 90%+ of the market
  What do yall make?

voting

My S-tier abitity to hyperfocus on learning useless things to the detriment of everything else.
- Well, if there's a choice between learning something relatively tedious and completely useless, and something relatively tedious that's urgently needed... I know what I'm going to pick!
  Oooh, an installation manual for a 1935 refrigerator!
  
  Oooh shiny!

Clearly you don't know how I clearly know this clearly isn't true? Well, it's simple, you didn't use the word clearly nearly enough.
Seriously, go to IMDb and look at any big TV series or movie then go to the goofs section and look for all the very smug 'clearly' remarks.
"The stunt man was clearly wearing a wig to make him look like a woman"..."watch the background to see that George Clooney was clearly not driving the car" etc etc.
And every single time the word brings nothing to the point being made. Nothing. It's just out there by the person to show how clever they are for spotting it.
'clearly' is IMDb's version of "well, ackchualllyyyy"
- You’re clearly overthinking this

I can throw dog treats with absurd accuracy and nearly always bounce/spin/toss them right near my dogs. Until I point it out.

My SO identifies people by their teeth. Scary as f for me. Like a Zorro would have caught if he opened his mouth.

Making a paper airplane that looks like a star trek shuttle
- Does it fly tho?
  
  Yep. Long as there isn't an insane amount of wind. Light breeze can carry it quite a ways

Pub trivia contests?
- That's a fun skill! You're also clearly good at picking usernames
  
  Thank you! I like making up usernames, and on reddit used to abandon them when I got tired of them. Past ones include HeebieMcJeeberson, MadJackMcMadd and AmiableBowelSyndrome. This was also a way to keep zeroing my karma so I didn't feel so addicted to reddit. I really like not having a cumulative Lemmy score.

Honestly, I think this skill could easily translate to one of those "lore keeper" or "continuity expert" jobs people have on TV shows.
- Script supervisor?
  They must have been one of the main markets for Polaroid. They must have been dejected when production stopped.

I know the year most Disney movies came out. Not all of them, but probably more than I should know. Generally, I know the year of release for most movies I have seen.
When it comes to remembering useful things, I might as well have dementia.

Northernlion build his entire career of bering the good of trivia, so it is viable. But not as easy as some other careers to get started in
- NL in the wild~
- His general knowledge is insane. But what drew me in was his whit.

I'm good at navigating places, but GPS has made it a less useful skill.
- It'll be hugely useful in a post apocalyptic world though

It used to be Simpsons quotes. But now it's been so long that I've forgotten most.
- Hmmm your ideas are intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
  
  Actual lol. Cheers.
- dental plan
  
  If we give up our dental plan... I'll have to pay for Lisa's braces!
  
  Lisa needs braces…

I can wiggle my ears
- I can pop mine by using the muscles that open close the escutcheon tubes

I wonder if OP is faceblind and has slight recognition but not completely.

Don't give me the remote when watching a show on Prime. That X-Ray feature is dope.

Unscrambling jumbled words. I can usually do 5-letter ones at a glance, and 6-letters in a few seconds.

I think it kind of validates a type of thinking that any decent person would want in a candidate. Capitalists are stupid. They don’t know the first thing about skills and abilities.
They’re the kind of bottom of the barrel dipshits who would dismiss a candidate who is great at spelling just because we have autocorrect, even though that’s a solid brain right there.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_recogniser A latent skill perhaps?
Also the new Dad in Will Trent is Bob the Street Tough from Seinfeld.
- I have facial blindness but I'm a super recognizer of voices.

My skill? Boring, I wanna talk about people with between zero and one lines on a show ages ago.
Teri Hatcher played a slut on the sitcom Night Court in the late eighties. That's unfair, she was a sex worker and sex work should not be illegal but I remember her as playing a slut.
- ...to quote my boss from my third professional job: "i may be a removed, but at least i'm not a slut: sluts don't get paid"...

I can shitpost
- That’s far from useless

I’m terrible at this. [It’s maybe because I watch my shows in black and white due to a cognitive processing disability].

My wife has your skill. I hold that skill to be of no value whatsoever.