In the name of fairness, I did warn him about my on-again-off-again superpower, which is the ability to make bugs disappear by the simple expedient of standing in close proximity to the miscreant software. (I'm fairly certain that it's a holdover from doing application/desktop support where the gremlin would skip town before I was out of my chair, down the stairs and standing next to its victim.) As superpowers go, it'd be infinitely better if it were more reliable. If it worked remotely, it'd be completely awesome.
It's a given in the comic book world that superheroes aren't given a choice about which power they have. In the end, it all boils down to genetic or circumstantial crap-shoot: Jor-El deliberately chooses Earth for his son (Superman); Spiderman is bitten by a radioactive arachnid; Mr. Incredible & Elastigirl are just begging for trouble when they mix-n-match zygotes.
But if we lived in a world where one was allowed to choose superpowers, I can think of a few I'd take before the one I've been given. Of course, the obvious ones are invisibility (particularly at review-time), time-travel, a Tardis-cubicle, Jedi mind-tricks ("This isn't the design you're looking for. I can go about my business.") & the like. But here's a taste of the more obscure ones I have in mind:
- Google-fu. Better yet, through Blackle. Then I could call myself a Blackle-belt. [rim shot]. Think about Bruce Lee, David Carradine, Jackie Chan, Chow Yun-Fat--you name it. What I'm talkin' about is the chick/dude who trained them. You know, the one who gets to call everybody "grasshopper." That level of Google-fu would make my life soooo much easier.
- DLL/EXE/BIN X-ray vision. See, management is prone--albeit not always terminally--to thinking "If we can buy or download this software, we don't have to invest any developer time." In reality, that can be light-eons from the truth. To contextualize: Imagine your parents arranging your marriage to someone you've never met & whose family you've never even heard of. Someone who doesn't vocalize their feelings all too well. That's what the experience feels like. In such scenarios, you barter time & emotional scars for precious insight. As always, "free" has a price-tag. It would be considerably cheaper if I could peek into the clockwork of third-party software.
- Priority-prognositication. Maybe this wouldn't be so much a super-power as a Q-caliber gadget. My mental image of an organization's priorities isn't far from a Galileo thermometer. Substituting priorities for temperatures would save untold effort, time, annoyance and office karma.
- Intelligent Data-schlepping. Ideally, this would involve having retractable USB jacks under your fingernails. One jack is plugged into the source computer, the other into the destination. The brain cherry-picks which data actually flows between source and destination with 100% accuracy. In Star Trek terms, this would be a katra-transfer that allows you to filter out the all the annoying personality quirks. As much time as the hoop-jumping of SVN merges & SQLExaminer siphons from every single week, this is a superpower I can totally get behind.
- Meeting-doppelganger. Maybe not a superpower so much as a creature from folklore (or D&D--your call). Except that the doppelganger transfers its synopsis of the meeting into your brain and its (copious) meeting notes to your workstation before disappearing into whatever dimension it occupies between meetings. Oh, and during the meeting, it knows which questions you'd want to ask. Who couldn't use that, I ask you?
- Error-message Zen. There is actually a decoder ring for error-messages. It's called "the internet." What I mean is the ability to decode the actual error...not what the software in question is complaining about. As with people, these can be two completely different--yea, even diametrically opposed--things. I think that the usefulness of such a superpower pretty much speaks for itself.
