The first time I tried to fix a leaky faucet, I created a geyser that wouldn’t have been out of place in Yellowstone. The plumber, when he arrived, gave me a withering glare that still haunts me in the small, dark hours of the night.

It was a glare that said, “Either read some instructions, or call a professional before you flood the kitchen.” The glare paused and then added, “Idiot.”

Funny thing: there are a whole lot of things I’ve always unconsciously assumed I should just be able to do. The instructions ought to either have been hard-wired into my brain, to be discovered at a critical moment (“If you’re listening to this, it means our forces have failed, the sacred gauntlet is in the hands of Acknetac, and the Magistery of Negalia will soon fall to the Krum. Either that, or you need to fix a faucet.”) or crept in there by osmosis over the years.

Which is, on the face of it, nuts. There are plenty of areas of human endeavour that demand some degree of skill and knowledge – even formal training. And yet in field after field, people either think they know innately what they’re doing, or are too ashamed to admit they don’t.

Here’s my first cut at a list of those fields – the things people think you ought to be able to do without help, but which carry a high risk of a kitchen geyser if you don’t do at least a little practice or research (and ideally some honest-to-goodness training or, in some cases, some calling-in-of-the-professionals) first:

• Human resources
• Sales
• Managing people and individuals
• Managing projects
• Parenting
• Public speaking
• Event organizing
• Dealing with loss or depression

Let’s have your lists. Complete this sentence. “It drives me crazy that people think they don’t need skilled and/or professional help to…”