Icebreaker: If You Could Pick Up a New Skill in an Instant What Would It Be?

I found a list called “The 25 most popular icebreaker questions based on four years of data“. So I’m gonna post a few, and see what happens.

Your mission: answer the question in the comments with a good story.

If you don’t have a good story, you are encouraged to make one up.

If you could pick up a new skill in an instant what would it be?

I would learn piano for the specific purpose of playing “Believe Me, if All Those Endearing Young Charms” badly and tricking my enemies into blowing themselves up.

14 Comments

  1. If I could instantly acquire any skill…well, let’s see, I’d love to be able to walk again, but that might be disqualified on the grounds that it would be a reacquisition. If it can’t be walking, I’d love to become instantly good at math and/or technology.
    Since a story is requested, I’ll give you an example of the issues I have with technology since the story of why I can’t walk anymore is long and not as much fun.
    Back in my misspent youth, I was attending college. I had to rely on the computers on campus. So far, no problem, there were many computers in different computer labs all over campus. One day I had arrived early on campus as was my wont (my sister says I’ll be early for my own funeral) and decided to take care of my computer business before the computer labs got crowded. When I walked into the lab, the only other person there was the tech support guy. There were in the neighborhood of 30 computers to choose from. I picked one at random, sat down, and logged in according to protocol. The computer thought for a moment and rewarded my efforts with the blue screen of death. I went up to the tech support guy and explained what had just happened.
    “You must have done something wrong,” he said. “Computers don’t give you the blue screen of death for no reason.”
    I had my doubts about that and knew technology seems to hate me. He directed me to another computer and had me sit down and log in. Once again I logged in according to protocol. The computer thought for a moment and gave me the blue screen of death again.
    “Huh…I’ve never seen that happen before,” the tech guy said. “Let’s try it on another machine.”
    He had me select another computer. I logged in according to protocol again. After a dramatic pause, the blue screen of death popped up. The tech support guy went back to his computer which he had been working on when I came in. What he had left off doing was replaced by the blue screen of death. Turns out that the third time I tried to log on, the entire computer system on campus went down. This sort of thing happens to me with annoying frequency. I don’t even have to touch technology for it to get snotty. It just likes to break or do things engineers and others tell me is impossible when I am around.

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