So either a trait or idea someone has that others make fun of, that saves the day?
My example:
Mine is back in 7th grade there was going to be a chocolate fondue day. 5 kids volunteered to bring chocolate chips for the chocolate fountain, then everyone else just said what they would bring. Most people said like marshmallows, Graham crackers, pretzels, the like.
One kid said he’s bringing chocolate bars. The teacher was confused and actively tried to discourage this idea. But the kid was insistent that dipping cold chocolate bars in a chocolate fountain was amazing. Some kids even made fun of him a bit, but the teacher moved on cause at the end of the day he could could bring what he wanted and it was all volunteer so can’t be picky.
The day comes along and… most of the kids who were supposed to bring the chocolate chips for the chocolate fountain didn’t. The fountain couldn’t even start with how little chocolate showed up. I think only one person brought a bag, which was not enough at all for a class of 25.
Then comes in our Rudolph with a giant bag of fun sized hershy milk chocolate bars.
There was no clapping or anything dramatic, but as soon as he showed up the teacher pulled him aside and a few minutes later his chocolate bars had been melted in the teacher break room and chocolate fountain day was saved!
“Deviation from the norm will be punished unless it is exploitable.”
As a kid I took it to mean: everyone has a place in society. It might just take a while to figure out what your purpose is
My wife takes the piss out of me for turning every task into a spreadsheet, but who ate a perfectly cooked, stress-free Christmas dinner exactly when it was supposed to be ready? We all fucking did, that’s who.
As a fellow spreadsheet nerd, can you explain your plan of attack? Like, how many dishes and how varied are the cooking temps/times in order to make everything come out of the oven and off the stove in time? And do you account for variables like washing utensils for reuse and/or operator error? I’m so uncoordinated in the kitchen that I can turn a 45 minute recipe into a 90 minute recipe just because I’m scrambling to find the right spices or washing utensils between uses or I spend too much time measuring things with absolute precision.
If I could plot out the entirety of the process in a series of Excel tables, I might actually be able to cook a meal efficiently.
That’s the actual sheet. If you adjust any times, sort on column E to get it back in the right order.
I worked at a Boy scout summer camp, which was underfunded and run by 14-20 year old boys. We had to spend almost a week setting up camp. Big old army tents made of canvas, took at least 4 people to set one up. They requires these big nails, maybe 10 inches in length, as stakes. Apparently they must have been very expensive because we never had enough.
Enter “Jamie”. Jamie was most definitely on the spectrum. Cool enough kid, but always had a slushie ring around his lips and a messy uniform. Kind of a disaster if you got paired with them, because just could not stay focused long enough to do anything.
Well I got tasked with leading a team of around 20 on the task of setting up a section of the camp. Good team, but within an hour we were out of nails. No nails, no tents getting set up no 😞😭. Enter Jamie. He kept getting passed around from group to group because he couldn’t handle the individual tasks. However, it turns out Jamie was an absolute bloodhound for finding stakes that had been forgotten or abandoned from the previous years shutting down of the campsites. Through Jamie, we found out there were thousands of these nails scattered throughout the woods. I gave him two helpers and asked him to stay ahead of our team and keep us fed with stakes so we could keep working. The helpers looked but also kept an eye on Jamie from going too far from the group. Within a couple minutes Jamie had enough stakes for the rest of the group and we kept going. Worked like a charm.
