Out of the many types of people that inhabit this particular spherical rock hurtling through space at thousands of miles per hour, the bad pedestrians tend to cause me the most feral rage of any form of human. Walking is one of the first things we as humans learn to do, up there with speaking and not peeing your pants. It’s something that a vast majority of the human population does every single day, barring a select few. So it would be safe to assume the least we could do is walk properly? No, some people just up and decided to suck at the one of the simplest things we as human beings can do. These bad pedestrians can be classified into many different groups, but the most abundant tend to be the waddlers, the linemen, the rear-end colliders, and the brute squad.

The Waddlers
The first mistake a person can make while walking is going at too slow a pace. Waddling your way to your destination as if someone had forever bound metal prisoner shackles about your ankles, all the while infuriating those behind you who walk at a properly brisk pace and are forced to either go around them, or idle behind in less open areas, all the while fuming at the lack of effort shown by their fellow bipeds, is not an acceptable form of striding. Waddlers tend to be either deeply engrossed in a conversation or other deeply engaging activities, or are sometimes morbidly obese, although this percentile is distressingly increasing. A word of advice for the former: don’t multitask, at least while you’re walking. You may not know that it is causing you to slow to far below the acceptable speeds, but the rest of us see it, and we think less of you for it, so stop it. And for the latter, that’s a rant for another day.

The Linebackers
Although a cousin to the waddlers, the linebackers are an entirely different type of idiotic walkers. While these walkers share a name with a particular football player position, they are completely different in almost every other spectrum. However, they can be compared to members of the various bovine species, as they both congregate in herds, tend to move at their own deliberately slow pace, and in my own observations are normally of lesser intelligence. A typical linebacker assembly usually consists of at least four but usually more pubescent males of various popularity levels of miscreants and nimrods that have festered and found a home in modern high schools. The main characters of the group array themselves in a straight line so that they may idly chat about whatever those guys talk about, leaving the secondary, less popular characters to trail behind them in a tight formation, or to try their chances in squeezing in on the edge of the formation. While this configuration may be useful in a football related situation, in a narrow corridor it only serves to block properly paced pedestrians from getting to their destinations or escaping from a fire/axe-wielding psychopath. So not only is this subgroup of bad walkers infuriating, it is also a safety hazard.

The Rear-End Colliders
While the last two pedestrians are most infuriating in cramped indoor areas, this kind is enraging anywhere you chance to meet them: the rear-end colliders, or REC for convenience’s sake. RECs are those people who while appearing to be just another non-infuriating walker, will just stop midstride wherever they are for any number of irrational reasons. They don’t pull over, they don’t slow down, and they certainly don’t throw on their blinkers. Instead, they simply stop and go about carrying through whatever stroke of genius graced them with its presence. To the unsuspecting person walking behind them, this can soon turn into an unwanted collision, hence the name, which many times results in the REC saying something along the lines of “watch where you’re going”. Here’s a thought: perhaps not stopping in a stream of moving people would cause them to not accidently run into you and interrupting whatever brilliant thoughts you were conjuring.

The Brute Squad
While there are people who cause other pedestrians to run into them, conversely there are pedestrians who run into people purposefully. These people I like to call the brute squad. Members of the brute squad go to their destination as the crow flies, i.e. in a straight line. Whoever happens to be in the path of a brute squad brute will promptly get an impromptu shoulder to the torso region, regardless of race, sex, or creed. The shoulder is an effect of their disregard to people around them, and their apathy towards avoiding collisions. Brute squad brutes tend to be of the larger builds, generally male with an abundance of testosterone and anger issues. They are easy to pick out of the crowd by their puffed out shoulders and limp arms much like a gorilla when walking bipedally, and the murderous glint in their eyes buried under a furled brow. It is advised to avoid these lumbering fellows, as you will in all likelihood be the recipient of a meaty shoulder in your chest region, unless you yourself are a largely built person and can withstand the force of these brutes. Occasionally, you will see two brute squad brutes pass each other, and give each other shoulder shoves in an effort to prove who is manlier. Take caution when this happens, as it may result in violence.

While some bad walkers are the result of mere careless behavior, it can be seen in the case of the brute squad that some of these frivolous disregarders of common courtesy are intentionally so, which makes it all that much worse. Violence and cruelty are already so abundant on this planet of ours, as well as starvation, diseases, abuse, and murder, so why can’t people at least walk in such a way that both allows them to reach their destination in a timely yet comfortable fashion that maintains the not pissed off mood? It really isn’t that hard a task to accomplish, in retrospect. So if you catch yourself or a close friend or a family member being one of said types of pedestrians, or any others that may cause similar anger in other people, please correct them, for the good of mankind.