Do you have a skill or talent?

We've all tried that one,

 

Wooooooooooosh

 

Avoiding work or learning a skill by being on here.

 

My thoughts exactly. Attitude nowadays is there's always someone to fill your shoes, you're just a number. Don't get me wrong, they paid me well and enabled me to get out not long after it all stopped being a pleasure, but I got them bloody good results in return. I did my 25 years, and one week later retired, maybe it rankled a little they didn't try to keep me, but I was definitely going anyway.
Coupled with my ability to do the job well came an inability to do summat just because the memo said so, I was like that annoying 4 year old...."why"...."but".....they dont like that, its a challenge to manage. They seem to prefer a malleable yes man who can't lead a team and get results.
Its nice to pop back and see the place going down the pan via the kid with a year in the job they stuck in there.
Dont miss the daily grind, retirement is great.

 

My fortè was fault finding. They had a lad straight out of his time. Struggling to correct a problem. All day Saturday. Sunday and bank holiday monday. 24 hrs at time and half and double time. Lads in operations asked me to have a look on the Tuesday. Took me half an hr to sort. ( experience of the fault that probably took me a couple of hrs to diagnose 1st time)
I'd been put on routine statutory maintenance which I hated with a passion. I'm the last person in the world you'd want to do that. Don't get me wrong some lads were good at the job and learning all the time. But some were chucked in at the deep end. I always said every day was a schoolday that's why experience beats qualifications hands down. I had both.

 

They’re not all they’re cracked up to be mate. I had one last week and it took until Sunday to get rid of the taste!

 

I spent my last year at the V&A training interns & wide eyed post grad students how to do my job, which was about to disappear in budget cuts..
& my pension’s worth fck all..

Do I win the work sucks prize.?

 

I'm guessing that the issue is that Germans hear foreigners speaking their language relatively rarely compared with how often we hear non-natives speaking English. We know what a Frenchman or a German or an Italian sound like speaking English, so we can define where someone is from reasonably accurately a lot of the time. But for people whose first language isn't as widely used as a second language, it's much tougher. Russians can rarely figure out where I'm from, because to them I just sound like a Westerner speaking their language. I've been asked if I'm Finnish, Italian, German, American and plenty of other random nationalities. On the other hand, most Russians can define quite accurately where someone is from when an Estonian, Latvian or Uzbek speaks Russian, because they're used to hearing it with these accents.

 

I've made a living out of music for nearly 30 years. Covid was a massive set back. I'm a bang average musician, but my knowledge of music is pretty solid.

I'm also double jointed.

 

Just googled you mate. You really do have talent.
And you had an audition for the Stone Temple Pilots. That’s good going.

 

At 8.2%? And at 4 units a bottle that's 40 units in one evening? Hats off to you mate, but I hope you're exaggerating!

 

"When we came here... teams like Arse-er-nel very much we hoped we would play! We are not just underdogs, we are.... how you say...... beeeg underdogs!"

 

I can turn my eyelids inside out.

 

Spot on. When I speak German it's immediately obvious to a native speaker that I'm not German. Mostly they guess I'm Dutch, but they also guess Belgium, Luxembourg, Denmark and the other Scandinavian countries. Very rarely do they guess I'm British, probably because very few British people speak fluent German. It breaks the ice at parties...

 

You do indeed. And yes I do. Glad I checked you out.

 

Seconded. But tbh never heard of the band.

 

STP are well worth listening to.

 

My flatmate at uni was ambidextrous. His party piece was if you gave him 2 pieces of paper, 2 biros and 2 sentences, he could write them both legibly, simultaneously.

 

I'm at the one pint and five pi55es stage.

 

There's also the issue of dialect. My South Walian (Merthyr Tydfil and proud of it!) Welsh was barley understandable by my University flatmate who came from the North of Anglesey and whose Welsh was very different.

My brother - lived in Italy for many years - learnt the language but felt he wasn't always understood. He then started using the hand gestures used by the Italians as he spoke and it helped greatly!

When in school recall being told that those of us who were bilingual (English and Welsh) had less problems learning the other languages on the school curriculum - French and Spanish compared to the monoglot students.

MT my guess your daughter will do well with other languages as she is fluent in English and Russian.

Back to the original question - I can play the piano and am the parent of a son who can put his fist in his mouth.