You're Doing it WRONG!
 

What do you do when someone messes up what you consider to be one of your specialties?

Case in point, I make a mean chicken enchilada in green sauce. My mom always tries to make them and always manages to not do it right. No matter how many times I instruct her how to do it, she messes it up. She won't ask me to make them, since I do it right, she always just does it on her own. It's very frustrating to watch someone do something and do it wrong! Of course, there's different ways of doing things, but if you aren't getting good results, why do you keep doing it wrong? She never learns from her mistakes ans instead of having my yummy enchiladas, we have to eat her ok enchiladas.

So, what do you consider to be your specialty (not just food, maybe playing a video game, mowing the lawn, figure drawing, laundry folding, etc. etc.)? And how do you react when someone does it wrong, even if you're right there ready to help or offer advice?

I find the best policy is to not interfer unless someone wants your help. Otherwise you come off as being pushy and a perfectionist, and it can really get on other people's nerves.

Well, when my meals are at stake, I like to be pushy. Why should I eat low quality food because they can't get it right? -_- I thought this recipe was foolproof too, but obviously I was wrong T_T

I doubt it. We'll agree that I'm cooking dinner and when I'm not looking, she'll start cooking something completely different. And when I complain she says that she's tired and she didn't remember. Ok, so you're tired, and instead of letting me cook while you rest, you go ahead and cook anyway? On what planet does that make sense? -_-

And when I finally get a chance to cook, nobody is home! So then I eat alone and they get fast food and takeout and almost never eat the leftovers. x_x Sometimes I just can't win. And now I have to eat slimy enchiladas. [/whining] ._.

I couldn't cook a good meal from scratch to save my own life D: I'd be glad for the help, just so long as whoever it is doesn't make me feel wrong and retarded about it.

Sometimes, I feel I'm being too pushy about other peoples' grammar and spelling. Proofreading the literary work of my schoolmates is one of my favorite things to do, but I notice myself getting harsh sometimes, and I feel bad about it .___.

Papers are a bit different. Most people are begging you to go over it with a fine toothed comb because they freely admit that they suck at their own language. O_o

I've gone over many an English paper and wondered how people thought they were making any sort of sense. But then, it was college, so they were probably drunk or high when they wrote it ^_^;;

*thinks*
I love to draw anime..I'm not the best at it, but I'm good for my years of experience.
I really hate it when I see somebody trying to draw anime and failing horribly, then comparing it to mine and saying mine sucks.

My specialty is being able to sit on my butt without moving all day.

When people upset that, I get angry.... and you wouldn't like me when I'm angry. >__>

Yes! I had a friend who did that. :o It sucks, doesn't it? I'm not super-great, but when someone sucks more than you and they criticize you, it's really awful.

I make some pretty good fried rice. My dad is an excellent cook usually. He makes the world's best pancakes and some really amazing pizza. But he can't make fried rice like I can. Honestly, it's more sad and cute than it is infuriating. Until I have to eat it. lol

Spelling/Netspeak can anger me, too. I have dear dear friends who get lazy and just type "ur coming, rite?" (or something along those lines). It makes me so mad. I have no idea why. Maybe it's because I know they can actually spell and they're very intelligent people, but they can't take the extra half second to type a few extra letters. I think it makes them look stupid. But maybe that's just me.

Also, people who will type completely incoherent sentences and expect you to know what they're talking about drive me crazy. I'm not talking about people who have English as a second language, or people with learning disabilities. I mean those people who, for some reason, just won't type in clear sentences. I want to ask them what they said, except that I'm worried that their reply will be even harder to understand. Maybe it's my fault. I don't know.

Okay, enough whining from me. lol

I have a few words that I compress into Netspeak. BRB, when I'm running away really quick. WB, when someone comes back. And SRSLY, because I think it's funny XD But other than that, Chatspeak annoys the heck out of me. Type it out! Expecially now that people are making up newer and longer abbreviations. So suddenly a whole sentence is a string of letters that I'm supposed to understand? Um...no!

As an aside, instead of Netspeak, I just wrote Newtspeak XD That's why spellchecking is good!

As for the incoherent sentences, oh, I feel you! I HATE that! I think it's even worse though when they do that for some sort of composition, like their journal or a piece of fiction. It's one thing if you're firing off a few rapid comments in a chat or forum, but how the hell can you post an short story that's not even in English for the most part? This is called communication people! If others can't decipher what the heck you're saying, you're not communicating at all! You might as well grunt and whistle and scratch your ass. RAR!

Yeah, I am so with you on that. It annoys the hell out of me. I've always been picky with writing and lately it seems that people's ability to communicate has just gone down the crapper. -_- Now that browsers like Firefox have built in spellcheckers, how can you even write up that crap and misspell so bad? The angry red lines compel me to fix stuff that I misspelled, like Newtspeak! XD Well, it doesn't like Netspeak either, but I really don't understand. There are some sites I frequent that are built specifically for FireFox users, so when I see people mangle stuff over there, I wonder how they heck they can do that! It only takes a few seconds to right click and correct the mistakes....unless you just flubbed up a whole text so bad it'll take you longer to fix it than you took to write it. -_-;;;;

I happen to be a gammarophile and it seriously annoys me when people mess up and leave it even when their mistake is shown to them. I also dislike the people who thing there is no correlation between chatspeak and poor communication skills. My mother's a high-school teacher and has had students uses chatspeak in papers without realizing it. The only time I use chatspeak is when I'm mocking someone.


I don't know how I would live if my specialty was mowing the lawn...

Nothing is foolproof to a sufficiently trained fool.

I get like this A LOT. Unfortunately, I can't really think of any specific things. Mainly I only get all "Ahh you're doing it wrong! Let me finish it off!" is if I'm at school, forced to work in a group for a project. I'll take over and do all of the work so that it's nice and pretty. I'm a huge perfectionist, so watching somebody else slaughter my grade drives me crazy.

My stuff like this is usually computer related. My Mum is one of those people that likes to learn stuff herself instead of letting someone else do it.
I used to get so impatient standing behind her, trying to help and waiting... waiting :D
I just want to push them out of the way! :D

My mom is like, the opposite of your mom! She has no idea how to use the computer and doesn't take any initiative whatsoever. So she's always asking you to come down and show her the same stuff over and over and over. And you stand behind her explaining something fairly obvious for like, the tenth time and it gets old. Really old. She wants us to hold her hand the whole time, but personally, I learned from exploring my computer. I want other people to explore too, not just wait to be spoonfed information.

Well, I'm not the best at drawing or whatever, but out of all my friends, they love to watch ME do it the most. I love drawing chibi and I think I'm better at it handdrawn, but they attempt to draw and I'm all like, "Wtf @the chin man, add some curve to the back, shoulders are too wide."
Lol, as if I have a friggin anime show.

Right. Netspeak/Chatspeak is one thing if it's done when you're texting someone on your cell. You have limited space and such. "Brb" and "lol" aren't quite so much of a problem. Because it looks kind of silly typing out "laugh out loud." But when it almost becomes another language due to all the numbers and letters substituted for words... that's when it's a problem.

Though you're completely right that it can be funny. xD

Exactly! It bothers me most when people are trying to prove a point, but don't bother to make themselves clear. I've seen people try to make a point with sentences that have no end, pronouns that don't refer to anything, missing verbs, and erratic punctuation. And then they expect you to agree with them.

Oohhh... fiction! That brings up another issue! You know when you're reading a story that's supposedly in English and then suddenly there's badly written Japanese all over the place?? That bothers the hell out of me. Well, if, for example, you're writing an Oofuri fanfiction, you honestly shouldn't write it without Mihashi saying "Abe-kun" because it would sound out of character, but the majority of the time when you're writing in English.... just write it in English, please! Oh, I'm such an ass about fanfiction (and original fiction), really. So I'll stop now before I offend the world. :P

You're totally right. It will all go back to grunting and scratching and whistling. I'd like to add "eating bugs out of other people's hair" to that, too.

I don't mind honorifics in fiction. There really is no good English equivalent. That's like when they have a set of lovers that typical refer to each other as Whatever-San and Whoever-San and suddenly they're calling each other Mr. Whatever and Miss Whoever. That just does not work. So I'm fine with honorifics, but I do hate the random outbursts of Japanese. The the characters are multi-lingual and occasionally toss out a work, fine. If they're only supposed to be speaking one language, stay consistent!

Moving back to chatspeak, I once read a story that contained the following sentences:
"Ok, but don't lol at me."
He walked out and everybody loled at him.

I read it as loll instead of l-o-l. I was honestly baffled. What the hell? How can you incorporate that into your writing and think that makes sense? It's worth noting that this particular writer couldn't even consistently spell the characters' names. FF.net hurts my soul. T_T

The sad thing is, people's vocabularies truly are on the decline. I'm always sad when people tell me that they hate to read or they don't care about grammar or stare at me blankly when I use a fairly common word because they don't know what it means.

Yeah, I need to stop before I get depressed ^_^;;

Ugh, I know how that is. It also bugs me when people who very obviously aren't as good as you show you a picture, then get all angry and huffy when you say something like, "It looks nice, but her eyes aren't really level".

On a somewhat related note, I once had a friend who is debately better than I am (it depends on who you're talking to. Our styles are completely different from each other, so it makes it hard to tell) show me a picture she drew and tell me there was something off about it but she couldn't tell what. I offered my opinion, pointing out one or two things that didn't look right to me. Her response was, "No offense, but you're not as good as I am so it's kind of pointless to take criticism from you". Not only was I offended by her blatant insult, but I was irritated that she thought just because I wasn't as skilled as her, I couldn't spot flaws in a picture (I can't draw a horse, but I know what one looks like and can tell if a picture of one is good or not). So that's my random little rant =)

That is annoying. I hate when people fish for compliments, but then insult you and your intelligence if you don't tell them what they want to hear.