Because I’m a big thieving thiever and entirely uninspired, I’m halfassedly stealing a post idea from Ms. Aussa Lorens of things I suck at doing.

I’m decent at a lot of things, excellent at a few and absolutely terrible at most. These are some things I’m terrible at. Don’t make me do them, please.

Sing.

I have perfect pitch. I can tell when something is even slightly off key. You’d think this would make me musically talented, but nope. Take a sack of ferrets, light it on fire and swing it around your head helicopter-style while playing Biz Markie‘s Just A Friend on a boombox, and that’s not even half as off key as my singing voice.

The only thing having perfect pitch does for me is make it so that I can’t stand to hear my own voice. When I sing out loud, I turn the volume waaaay up to drown out my caterwauling. It’s fuckin’ awesome.

Negotiate.

I am the world’s worst negotiator. If you try to sell me something and ask me to negotiate a price, I will end up paying twice as much for another item I don’t want because it came with a free thingamabobber and shiny, while not buying the thing I originally set out to get. If you make me bargain, I will hand you my bank card. “Just take what you think is fair. I need a nap.”

I don’t want to haggle. I’m not at a bazaar in Tashkent. I want a price tag with a price on it. I want to hand someone a card, sign something and have them hand me pretty stuff, preferably wrapped in tissue paper in a nice bag with those rope handles.

This is the first world and I demand price tags, dammit.

Before you get any funny ideas about negotiating away all my money, you should know that I don’t have any and that my best friend is an excellent negotiator who is on call for all of my negotiating needs. So there.

Write poetry.

In the Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, there is a species renown for bad poetry called the Vogons. I am at least half Vogon. My poetry might not kill you, but it will make your ears bleed. Here is some poetry that’s actually posted on this blog:

From An Amphigorical Admonition

Alumveth sleething glabben enray
Didst cushowee zow emprum
Enst yestrate cushaway
Twast brangen t’etul droolum

From I Don’t Write Poetry

Sacrébleu! She sighed, spying Sunday’s screwy scribing suggestion.
She suspected some suspiciously surreptitious significance.
Something so senseless surely shouldn’t stand.
Sadly, sacrificing sensibility, she surrendered.
Sanity scrapped, sagacity shunned, syntax subjugated;
Stupidity soared, surpassing sophistical syllogism.
She sophomorically sought statements solely spewing S’s.

See what I mean? Granted, the first one was a joke and the second one had to start every word with the letter S, so there were constraints… Eh, who am I kidding? Constraints or not, I suck.

I prefer expressing myself in complete sentences. And sentence fragments. Sorry for making your earballs bleed.

Spell the word “occasionally” and other double-letter monstrosities.

I have a mental block on polysyllabic words with double letters. I’m usually okay with gerunds (although, I just typed that as gerrunds), e.g. running. I know that if you turn “run” into “running,” you add another N. It’s all the other freak words that have double letters, which is almost all of them. I’m totally hopeless with words that have both double and single letters together, e.g. “occasionally.”

When I attempt typing the word occasionally, I will generally just mash my fingers against the keyboard in such a way that my very smart computer might be able to tell that I’m trying to spell the word occasionally instead of having a stroke.

“occsskl;sdhfewpfoj!dwwg,.uu8ty”
“Did you mean occasionally?”
“Why, yes, I did.”

Use credit card swipers.

Those hieroglyphs on the front of the machine are absolutely no use. I tend not to even look at them since they just confuse me even more. If there is a salesperson, I will hand them my card and make them run it. (Don’t look at me like that. It’s their job.) If there isn’t a person, like at a gas pump, I’m totally fucked.

There are really only a handful of options for swiping a credit card and I will try all the fail ways before I get the right way. I’ll stand there for ten minutes, trying and retrying ways to put my card in that are completely wrong. In a fit of pique, sometimes, I try to shove the card in there like a robotic arm feeding Fritos to a plaster head, as if forcing it in the wrong way will make it right.

The pressure mounts with every wrong swipe until I get flustered and want to run away in a flurry of flailing arms and girlie WAAAAHs, but I can’t since I still have no gas in my car. Then, and only then, at peak embarrassment, do I manage to put it in the right way. Panic subsides and all is well until the next time. There will always be a next time.

Figure out which polite answer to use.

These are conversations I have every day:

Person: “Hi, how are you?”

Me: “Not much. You?”

 Or the opposite:

Person: “Hi, what’s up?”

Me: “Fine. You?”

I hate the “you too” conversation. Most of the time, “you too” is appropriate. For example:

Person: “Have a good weekend!”

Me: “You too!”

But, sometimes, “you too” backfires. For instance, when dealing with customer service people:

Waitress: “Enjoy your meal.”

Me: “You too!”

Or:

Salesperson: “Thank you for shopping at Bob’s Wizbangs & Whirligigs.”

Me: “You too!”

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What do you suck at?