Simple stuff you can't do

[westlondonmist]

1 hour ago, TheScarlettChad said:

I can't tie my shoes. I wear slip ons. My partner is going to try to teach me how to tie them, She's gonna struggle lol. I wish I could tie my laces, buying slip ons is getting expensive.

I'm really shit at doing laces. I can do them, but they always come undone. I use ez laces for work shoes now and Reebok pumps for trainees

 

[Devon Malcolm]

When we went on a weekend to Ghyll Head with my school when I was 11 I had to pay someone with a can of Fanta to tie my laces.

[textonly]

On a slight pivot about tying shoes, I wonder if this is a common feeling...

So, I can tie my shoes. I do it fine, I do it at what I believe is a completely average speed, yet any time I have to stop to tie my shoes in the presence of another adult, I feel as if they must be looking at me, thinking, "man, he's so slow tying his shoes... and he still does it in that way that little kids do it... why hasn't he learned the adult way to do it, the faster way? How embarrassing for him. I shouldn't mention it". And, I mean, I'm pretty sure I am doing it the normal/adult/faster way, but it feels like such a juvenile thing somehow, like whomever I'm doing it in front of instantly takes on this parental presence and I feel like a dumb kid holding them up. But then I wonder if maybe there are new techniques on shoelace tying that I've missed out on, like the way all the science on dinosaurs has changed in the same timeframe.

We all think this every time we tie our laces, right? Right?

[Jazzy G]

15 hours ago, westlondonmist said:

I'm really shit at doing laces. I can do them, but they always come undone. I use ez laces for work shoes now and Reebok pumps for trainees

 

My trainers are laced an eyelet below the top one, but double knotted so they stay on, but I can just pop my feet in and take them back out with minimal effort/fuss. My two pairs of boots are a totally different matter, but they tend to stay fastened. 

[air_raid]

I need to add "measuring stuff" to my massive list. Mrs raid trusted me to measure up her requirements and it turned out to be a mistake. She has a chunky 8-plug adaptor and wanted to measured up for a desk shelf she fancied fitting so its off the floor. Length and height weren't going to be an issue - the product description said there was 12cm wide available space inside the shelf. I measured across the width of the adaptor really carefully to make sure I was measuring straight across at a right angle to get an accurate width and informed her it might be OK but its a bit tight, as the adapator measured slightly more than 11cm wide to fit into a 12cm gap.

Buy shelf, get it home.... it never dawned on me, nor did I notice after looking at this adaptor hundreds of times in my life, that it wasn't quite a perfect rectangle shape, one end is fatter than the other, and of course, it doesnt fit in the shelf. She wasn't happy, and I feel even more worthless than ever.

[SuperBacon]

Me reading that knowing the Out Of Context thread is dead: 

[Tommy!]

1 hour ago, SuperBacon said:

Me reading that knowing the Out Of Context thread is dead

Off topic but while I was on my jolly to London the other weekend and getting the bus to Camden, as recommended to me by you IIRC, a posh young woman got on taking her son to the zoo.

He must have had a hole in his jumper and was fiddling with it as she sat behind me and kept softly saying over and over "it's only a small hole but if you keep putting your finger in it will get bigger". "That's how holes work, the more you put your finger in the bigger it will get". "If the hole gets bigger you'd be able to put two fingers in, and I don't want that"

 

[deathrey]

Light a lasting fire. In my husband's absence, I decided I would put the log burner on as it's freezing and the baby is ill. It took me three attempts to get anything near a fire that would keep burning for longer than a few minutes. Lighting a lasting fire was a big part of human evolution for warmth and cooking etc, I think it's safe to say that I would not have survived very long. I never knew setting things on fire could be so difficult.

[Carbomb]

2 minutes ago, deathrey said:

Light a lasting fire. In my husband's absence, I decided I would put the log burner on as it's freezing and the baby is ill. It took me three attempts to get anything near a fire that would keep burning for longer than a few minutes. Lighting a lasting fire was a big part of human evolution for warmth and cooking etc, I think it's safe to say that I would not have survived very long. I never knew setting things on fire could be so difficult.

First thing I thought of was those incessant mobile game apps where they advertise a woman in a freezing cold, broken-down house, shivering with her baby, and you have to fix it up to save them.

The actual fire thing - yeh, I was mystified as a kid as to why people always said that wood burns, because every time I tried to set fire to a big piece of wood, it wouldn't work; you get a square millimetre of a glow, and then it goes out. Same with coal.

Of course, now being a big manly man who COOKS MEAT WITH FIRE on the barbeque, I get how it works, but it wasn't obvious at all initially.

[Chest Rockwell]

5 minutes ago, deathrey said:

. In my husband's absence, I decided I would put the log burner on as it's freezing and the baby is ill.

This sentence on its own really conjures up an image of you living in victorian squalor, all coughing and soot covered. 

[SuperBacon]

Lighting a fire is easy. You hold that pilot button down and it goes tk tk tk tk like the start of Shook Ones, and then turn it and it goes WOMF and starts up.

Hey look, it's me

I jest. An actual fire? Yeah I'd have died with the dodo.

[Loki]

Re: tying shoelaces, there was a TED talk about tying your shoelaces and apparently 90% of us are doing it wrong.  They explain that if done the right way, a  single bow shouldn't come undone.

Having seen this, I relearnt tying my shoelaces to do it the "right" way... but my shoelaces still come undone, less often to be sure but it still happens.

 

TL:DR you go left over right, then right over left.  Took me about a month to retrain myself to do it this way.

 

 

[Tommy!]

I find the key to a fire is enough kindling to build heat in the fireplace and getting some mid sized logs going before anything too big.

It'll burn quick and a big log needs enough heat built up to really keep going without embers in the grate as an aid.

Getting an even start helps too, if all the kindling burns left to right it looses the heat so some knots of news paper under it gets it going even I've found.

[Keith Houchen]

25 minutes ago, Tommy! said:

It'll burn quick and a big log needs enough heat built up to really keep going

Everything become a topic on shitting if you give it enough time. 

[Browser Brady]

I find it hard to follow simple directions or instructions.  if you give me complex instructions i can nearly follow them better. 

Stuff “Move that there like this” is like Chinese to me. 
 

My dad, when teaching me to drive would say things like “follow that car into that lane” and i would be like what car, the red one, the green one or the white one ?

Our landlord was over the other night and he moved our washing machine out and couldnt get it back in. I was trying and he was roaring at me to “heel it in”

I didnt know what the fuck he meant. 

 

People who say i am going “up” to a location that’s physically south of them on a map absolutely genuinely confuses the life out of me. 

Edited November 8, 2023 by Browser Brady