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!
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.
Bro I can’t imagine how much of an eye for detail you must have to be able to notice where a stake was driven into the ground in an over grown forest. Like was he just really good at noticing where the underbrush had grown funny?
It’s a nack. See one, the others will likely be in a tent shaped layout. Some brains are just very good at visual pattern matching.
I have an unbroken record for being the person that finds anything tiny and lost. In school the kids called me “night vision”.
Lose a ball over the fence an 1am. 10 people looking. Can’t find it. Get me to look and I find it in 1 minute or less. Lost a diamond or earring backing in shag carpet? I’ll find it ao fast you won’t believe it.
I’ve occasionally had to pretend it takes longer to find it, just so they don’t think I pranked them and took it.
My wife is like this. We’ll be on a walk and she’ll stop mid sentence to walk ten feet into someone’s yard and grab a four leaf clover. She does this all the time and we have a huge collection of them, and that’s with us usually giving them away to people we pass further down on our walks.
I notice negatives to it as well.
When I trim the driveway hedge I have to pick any errant cuttings out of the rose garden. So I spend about 1-2 hours looking for one type of leaf amongst another type of leaf.
When I close my eyes for the next 12 or so hours all I can see is the type of leaf I was looking for, my brain is so locked on to looking for the pattern.
It’s a similar thing with four leaf clovers - I never in my life found one, even during periods where I’ve been scanning every bit of green while hiking. But then we had a friend who isn’t really paying attention to her surroundings, and just randomly goes ‘oh, moment’, and picks up a four leave clover from a few metres away.
Seems my daughter is also developing that talent - last summer she picked up a few while playing outside.
Keep your head moving like a caffeinated puppy dog and look for the tiny glint of sunlight on the stake head as you tromp through the campsite.
Neurodiversity is a blessing in disguise; we look, without seeing that!
Yeah, stakes aren’t expensive but replacing all the equipment kids lose is expensive.
“Why are we all out of spike?”
Jamie pulling hundreds of spikes out of the ground that were lost by previous campers