CREDIT: THINKSTOCK (ANTONIO_DIAZ)
PSA: walking in a group of four, side-by-side down the hallway is disrespectful to all those around you, please think again before barricading the hallway and preventing any student from passing.

I noticed something this year. I noticed that there are an awful lot of people who don't fully grasp how a hallway works. Here's some quintessential advice on how not to be an asshole at 8 a.m. on a Monday.

If you can't walk and text, don't try to, unless you want to be barreled over by the seven people stuck behind you. It's generally accepted that people show up to school pretty close to class times. The last thing everyone needs is an impromptu road block because your mom just texted you, “Good luck at school honey!!!! Love you!! There's turkey in the deli drawer when you get home xoxo.”

That text can wait, kid, keep walking.

It's not just incompetent texters who are stopping in the halls either; no, entire groups of freshman seem to think that the middle of a hallway is the perfect place to stop and discuss the latest presidential debate. You can hear the idiocy long before you see the traffic jam, “LOL THAT DONALD GUY SURE SNIFFS A LOT HUH GUYS? HAHA.” Dude, no one cares about your incompetent surface-value rhetoric on a debate that you watched for about three minutes before sticking your entire fist into a jar of Nutella.

This brings me to the next culprits of shitty hallway walker: people with food. Either find a table or wait until you get to class. If you can't afford to sit and choke down breakfast from Oasis, then you should be running to class, not trying to walk and eat an entire omelet with a coffee in your hand.

When I see people having meals on the go I almost admire their dedication to spilling food on themselves. My admiration quickly turns to annoyance when four others and I are stuck behind the food-walker going at the speed of a determined tortoise. I'll admit that sometimes I've entertained the idea of tripping them and watching the food-walker fall face first into their takeout container.

I suppose I've saved the worst kind of people for last. Everyone has been stuck behind these imbeciles at some point and it doesn't look like the world is getting rid of them anytime soon. These are the people who walk in groups of four, right across an entire hallway. They're too thickly knit to just nudge through and they're far too engrossed in gossip or football conversation to hear your cries of “excuse me”.

There's only one thing you can do in these situations: you have to wait for a hallway intersection wide enough to get around them and do the passive aggressive Hermione Granger/Ron Weasley shoulder brush from Sorcerer's Stone. You know the one.

Short of installing hall lanes for fast and slow walkers, it doesn't appear that the school can do anything to help us in our dire quest to get to class on time. So the burden falls on all of us. If anyone sees these kinds of people in the hall, please don't hesitate to give them a nudge and shout a prompt “move it” remembering that gratuitous swearing always gets things done quicker. I trust that with a little help from everyone we can make hallways great again.
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