I Have A Secret Superpower

. . . apparently . . .

Most of my life I've been able to "fit" things. Let me explain. As a child I had a lot of time to figure stuff out. We moved around a lot, I had and still have a life-long love affair with reading scientific, technical, practical, and mechanical magazines and manuals. And our moving around gave me opportunities to indulge my passion. There were generally always tech / sci magazines around, generally agricultural because one of Dad's careers was Agricultural Engineer, but every school I went to had at least one set of encyclopedias, one set of How It Works or similar. One farmhouse we lived at had a decade's worth of "Western Farmer" magazines that always included two to ten articles of home-made agricultural machinery, modifications a farmer may have made to their equipment, and novel uses for existimg implements.

You get the idea. Now add to that, that since I was old enough to read (around age 4) and write (age 5) I was also a lucky 60s toddler whose grandparents bought him the Mickey Mouse comics, and my hero of the series was Daniel Duesentrieb aka Gyro Gearloose in English. Yep, the inventor chicken with the Thinking Cap. I was determined to either become him when I grew up, or a veterinarian. We always had cats and dogs, horses and donkeys, and later emus, kangaroos, goats, sheep, and even a camel. So for over a decade it was a coin-toss that separated those choices. 

What Do I Mean, "Fit" Things? 

Well, for a start and as you've probably gathered by now, I ended up with engineering rather than biology. One of the first times my superpower kicked in - and I noticed it - was around age ten when we were driving along an inland Western Australian road and suddenly there was a rattling clattering racket the likes of which none of us had ever heard. (Also, this was our first year of owning a battered old secondhand Landrover and definitely our first time driving 1,500km with everything we owned loaded in the tray. We had no idea what noises a Landie could make and still survive back then.)

So I'm listening to the noise as we slowed down and Dad got ready to change a tyre out there. "Hang on! I think we have something wrapped around the shaft!" 

Dad looked and sure enough, a piece of barbed wire had gotten on the driveshaft, FSM knows how, but there it was. I got to slide under the car and use the fencing pliers to cut it loose. And a month later when we were sitting in the homestead we'd moved to that Dad asked me how I'd spotted that lone piece of wire at speed on such a boring long drive and I realised - I hadn't seen it. At least, I hadn't seen anything on the road immediately before and in fact we'd all been dozing off because after a while every kilometre looks like every other kilometre along roads like that. 

But in my head I must have fitted the knocking noise to the engine - nope, engine turns faster than that - and to the wheels - nope, they turned slower than the noise was going - and then I must have realised that the driveshaft was the only thing that was revolving at about that rate at that speed. I have to stress that at the time it was just a sudden flash and there was the answer, but when we were talking about that trip a few weeks later I still thought it was just obvious and wondered why no-one else had picked it. But in my head, I fitted the rhythm to the rhythms of the other things and matched it. 

Quite often I can match a spark of light to which part of a machine is producing it, a wrong sound to a particular part's motion. And I honestly never really thought this was a Secret Superpower until I was THIS years old. 

Similarly, seeing one of these on the counter at an antique/curio shop in South Guildford in Perth, WA, with a sign on it saying one could win a $50 voucher for the shop if one could guess what it was. 

It was a challenge. Heater? (I also have to add - it was not the one pictured, but quite similar. And it had been painted and so wasn't a rust piece like the one pictured.) I thought about it. Age? No idea. Old. And suddenly it hit me, I spoke to the proprietor who confirmed that I had it right, and I told them to keep the voucher for the next person. I was happy just to have picked it. If you want to have a go, think about it, answer at the bottom of the article.

Having no Music experience, when I saw this next thing in the opp shop, I was puzzled. But I did my thing and brained it - hard - for a few minutes and finally, I figured it out. 

Got home and googled violin brace and: bingo!

Finding an odd-shaped piece of nylon on the street, realising it had to be the clip for a menu sign since it was outside a bakery, taking it in to the owner and them being able to save one of their signs falling down into their fast food prep area - priceless. I got free pies and pasties for a few weeks after that. 

Things just - fit - in my head after a bit of thinking. And I have to admit that quite often I don't manage to work out an item's purpose, but generally if I can examine a thing and turn it around, the answer comes to me. 

A: The mystery object was a WWII Automobile Headlight Blackout Cover. They were ancient history before I was even born. 

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