I worked in auto parts for a while to force myself to be social, helped a lot. I think most things are skills, albeit some harder to learn than others. But, we had a sales rep that everyone loved, guy came by once a year and seemed to remember everyone and would literally pick up a conversation from the year before. If you were working on a car, he would remember the model, year and what you were doing with it at the time and asked how thing progressed. The guy was an amazing salesman and everyone was astounded at his perfect memory as it seemed almost supernaturally good. Plus, the guy had a great personality and just felt genuine. When he retired, my boss said that before he came in, he would read the notes he wrote down after the previous meeting and get himself up to speed before coming in. He smirked at me when I seemed more impressed and said he didn't like to give away the 'secret to the magic' but that I would appreciate it more than most. If you're a lucky SOB with perfect memory, it just comes naturally. Me, I understood he was even better and smarter, because he came up with a system that worked so well than just lucking out in the memory department.
I fall into the lucky SOB category in some ways, things like mechanisms, machines, parts, controllers and stuff, I can recognize at the slightest glance. I can tell you what does what, why they probably chose it, rough pricing on each part, whether it is name brand or knock off and all sorts of dumb technical stuff nobody would really even know. When I meet the people who design machines, I get looks of horror at times because I 'know all their secrets' and clearly spent far too much time reverse engineering all their hard work. On the other hand, I can retain a person's name for probably 3 seconds, can rarely even tell you someone's hair color, what kind of shoes they were wearing or any other detail about people. I can remember voices and what I talk to people about that, and in my brain, they are filed under a name of 'That was the HP latex guy who smelled funny' or whatever.
If someone asks me why a print costs as much as it does, I will tell them that their $100 job is $1.07 in ink and $2.18 in materials and will take me 5 minutes to process after 23 minutes of print time. They then think 'Oh, I have leverage to ask for half that price, it's only costing them $2.25!' to which I point out that they are now negotiating for what my time is worth. Not a magic bullet, cheap people will always be cheap, but seems to be a bit of a social hack as people are less likely to try and undervalue my time.
