Little victories

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Little victories is what I call being able to do something when another person tries to tell you you can't, or that person has difficulty doing something but it's easy for you.

Example 1: My mum was complaining that her bag won't zip up. I told her to give me a shot at it. She said alright, but you won't be able to. It was the way it was made, it won't zip up properly. I took a look at it, held the end of the zipper firmly, pulled, zipped a tiny bit, held up the two sides of the bag and zipped the whole bag shut.

Example 2: My mum had left her keys somewhere. I stayed calm and helped her look. We looked in the chemist, K-mart and when she was about to call the taxi I told her to look in Flight Centre - the shop we were first in. She said I'll try but they won't be there. They were there.

Example 3: Mum was complaining that an application on Facebook wouldn't open. I opened it in another browser.

Maybe it is just my mum or maybe it is that people never look for other ways of fixing problems. I may be forgetful, but I'm also organised so that I'm not as forgetful. I look finding a solution from every single angle.

Can anyone relate? Have people told you something is impossible to do and then you do it with minimal effort?
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Oh my, yes. Actually, it does not pay to tell me it is impossible.

Long ago I had a book about animal intelligence [not a weighty tome, childhood this was]. Story of an experiment. Chicken dog, cat separated from food by a section of witre fence. The chicken pecked at the wire, blocked. The dog stared wistfully through the fence. The cat strolled to the end of the fence, walked around and started eating.

Of course my wife and I trade off. Some of it is ritualized - "you will never get across this street" and then the traffic lifts. But a lot is real - I will be sure what I have tried to do and failed ten times cannot be done; she will solve it in seconds. Or vice versa.

Only sometimes. Other times I can see from only mine angles and NTs find the obvious solution.

Yeah:

Emergency situations and things like car accidents; I'm one cool cucumber who can take command of it all without thought.

When no one else can pick up that rock and crush the ailing animal's skull, I'm your man-boy.

My victory will come tomorrow, when I'm the first employee done their section, tomorrow. I'm going back to work.

Yes sometimes...mostly these days it's computer problems, though it worries me when people start thinking that I know everything about computers, because I don't.

I'm constantly amazed by the way ordinary people seem to go the long way round to get results (though paradoxically my mum used to accuse me of that ). Definitely since I was in my 20s, I've tended to be very direct in the way I see problem solving.

If somebody has failed with a task, that makes me more confident if I'm the next one to try the thing. I used to think that deepdown I must be a competitive little sod, but these days I suspect it's just the reassurance that comes from knowing that if I should fail, I'll not be seen as particularly stupid.

When something scary happens, sometimes I get this delayed effect, so for a few minutes I can function quite normally, and have been known to fix some quite bad problems during those few minutes of grace, before my endocrine system finds the panic button. It's strange because I'm habitually very risk-averse, and living with any kind of constant threat can destroy my happiness.

I used to refer to myself as a "miniature hero" until a well-known chocolate company stole my trade mark.

My mom has no clue how to use email or chat or anything. Yet, I can do it just fine. I had to help her open a file one of her cousins send her, and now she has no clue how to forward it to another relative as well.

Ditto. My mum accidently ran over the neighbours toddler in the drive way. Everyone was either just standing there or yelling at other people "Do something!". It was me who pulled the kid out from under the car and told the mother not to pick him up (possible spinal injuries so I wanted to keep him in the same position) and it was me who called the ambulance. I was the only one not panicking.

However in constrast I'm not very good at problem solving. I tend to miss the obvious.

Weirdly, I'm similar - but only for a while. I've come out of two car accidents without a scratch, both write-offs, and I emotionally fell apart after the first one - the second time, my partner was a wreck and I was calming HIM down! In an emergency, I can cope very well - for a few minutes. When the adrenaline wears off, I collapse in a gibbering heap.

Technophobic people (I'm guessing that's what's going on here) are the easiest to help, because their needs are so easily satisfied. But I always feel kind of sad, because it's too easy for me (I can hardly believe they're serious sometimes), and because I don't like to think of how helpless some people are with technology. I think it might have something to do with theory of mind - if a thing is obvious to me, I often find it hard to understand why it's not obvious to everybody.