5 Subtle Ways to Tell If Someone Isn’t Worth Your Time

• Article by Michael Cogliano
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• August 18, 2011
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• Michigan

Judging people is more than a habit on a college campus, it’s a necessity.  In the coming weeks that signal the beginning of the semester, you will come across way too many people on a daily basis to be able to give all of them a fair shake.  There are some judgments that seem the make themselves.  The lad who’s blasting Elton John in his mom’s ‘96 station wagon, probably wasn’t the king of his high school.  The girl with her head buried in her Blackberry who only looks up to complain about her latte, probably a bitch.  However, we are not always provided with such convenient ways to know if someone’s worthy of your time or if they deserve a tire iron to the face.  Luckily, a keen eye such as my own has developed a Cliffs Notes of sorts to help you pick up on a few of the more subtle clues that someone is not worth your breath.  

1) They leave the shopping cart in the middle of the parking lot: This guy deserves to be put in that shopping cart and rolled onto the interstate.  How fucking lazy do you have to be to leave your shopping cart 15 feet from an apparatus designed for the purpose of avoiding this?  This may seem like a small act, but if you see a guy leave his cart in the middle of a parking spot, you can bet he’s a major league douche.  Because inevitably, non-douchey people such as myself are licking my chops at that parking spot, only to pull 80% in and realize this asshole was too exhausted from wheeling out his 4 cases of Milwaukee’s Best to walk the cart back to the rails.

2) They often say “I like all types of music”: What types of music do you like?  It’s an easy enough question and a common one when you’re trying to make small talk.  Musical preferences aside, if the person answers that they enjoy “all types of music”, it’s a pretty safe bet that they’re not worth your time.  Why?  Well, saying you like all types of music is a shorter way of saying you don’t appreciate any music enough to voice an opinion so you’ll basically take whatever is shoved in your face.  All that is a short way of saying you’re a tasteless, uninteresting moron.

3) They pick up a copy of the school newspaper, don’t read it, then leave it on the ground: I see this everyday and it’s a very simple way to know that, even if you have a crush on the girl sitting two rows up, she’s worth less than the paper she littered.  Ironically enough, these are most often the individuals who could benefit the most from actually reading the thing (or learning how, anyway).

4) They leave the weights on the bars at the gym: The gym is a year-round hotbed for douche bags.  Studies (that I just made up) put the number of morons in the weight room upwards of 66% . So it's not surprising that you get another subtle clue to people not worth a fucking penny.  These are the guys who finish using the bench press and leave 200 lbs worth of weights on them.  Now we have these poor 88 pound girls trying to pull half their body weight off both sides of the bar because this asshole couldn’t take 3 extra minutes to put the weights back where he found them.

5) Their bag is on wheels and they’re NOT on vacation: I don’t care what the circumstances are, there is no excuse for wheeling around any bag unless you’re on an extended vacation.  If you see anyone wheeling their backpack around and they aren’t wearing a neck brace or in a wheel chair, don’t bother.  If they were a big enough tool to wheel their bag around campus, the quirks certainly don’t stop there.