The definitive list of annoying blokes you’ve met this year

The Wasteman

Wastemen seem to do nothing at all: they don’t do any work but they don’t go out and have a good time either. They are just sort of there like that unshiftable antique armoire in your great aunt’s house. This raises the paradoxical question: surely the absence of effort requires effort to maintain? It can not be easy to do no work at all and get away with it, can it? Plainly the vast web of lies spun by the wasteman so he can get away with doing nothing takes effort, which means that he might be less of a waster than he appears. If only he could use that energy for good instead of sitting around and doing fuck all like Russell Brand on polling day. 

Famous Example: Nick Clegg

The Weirdo

The weirdo inhabits a tragic Quasimodo-ish world of social anxiety, unwanted reclusiveness and permanently bad hair. The real mark of the weirdo is their ability to kill conversation stone dead simply with their presence. You could have a room with four best friends enjoying some high level roistering until the sudden appearance of the weirdo dissipates all the joy in the room. Large parts of first year revolve around avoiding the roaming weirdos who attempt to befriend you inappropriately.

Famous Example(s): Colin Creevey, Piers Morgan

The Northerner

As a Londoner, to me anyone who hails from north of Watford is both a strange and fascinating creature. Imagine my delight then, when the first guy I met at university came from the barren post-apocalyptic wastelands that surround Leeds. Northerners are raised on a mixture of glassing each other, wearing shorts in winter and pronouncing bastard as ‘basss-tuud’. They also make handy bodyguards when you start a fight in the local takeaway. Enjoy their friendship whilst it lasts because they are destined to be on the frontlines whenever our overlords decide to invade Syria/Crimea/North Korea/Iran. 

Famous Example(s): The 9th Doctor, John Snow and DCI Gene Hunt.

Gym Guy

One of the more brutal realities of our culture’s ever increasing Calforniacation is that we all have to look Californian nowadays. In happier, less health-conscious times the gym used to be the sole preserve of those fat public schoolboys who enjoy shitting in trophies, rape jokes and ‘rugger’. Now gym guy is in there every day, fit as fuck and tanned to a crisp, his crappy plastic bottle full of protein potion. Wanna know the worst part? He doesn’t even play a sport. It’s not even about being healthy anymore. It’s about being (in some kind of warped social-darwinian sense) ‘better’ than other, uglier, human beings.

Famous Example: Hugh Jackman

Toff Guy

You can spot Toff guy by looking at his face. If his jowls look like they’ll be puffy, saggy and red one day then, bingo, you’ve found one. You could also just go to the VIP area of the worst local club and look for the guy in a smoking jacket unironically drinking Grey Goose, loudly describing the time he fingered the sister of somebody off Made in Chelsea.

Toffs are incredibly defensive right now. It’s not fair whines the toff: Not fair that my parents have more money than yours! Not fair that people hear my accent and shout ‘nob’ and ‘wanker’ at me! Not fair that being white male and privileged means people are mean to me! It’s just so tough for them. They will have to console themselves with all their money, their country hunting lodges (‘Well done Sebastien you hit a partridge!’) and their inevitable invitation to Prince Harry’s wedding to whatever Tattler-fodder he ends up knocking up.

Famous Example: Monday night, E4, you know who I mean.

The Private Schoolguy 

Social status, shit loads of money and the far-reaching benefits of nepotism aside, all private schoolguys know that they are basically fucked. They are doomed to one day wake up aged 50, look glumly into the mirror, and see a guy who looks like Nigel Farage staring back at them.

Unlike the toff who welcomes this fact (and has a hard on just thinking about it) the private schoolguy spends his time at university trying to hide from the inevitability that their career will involve fixing the stock market and fucking over ‘povos’. All your retro 90’s gear, the email newsletter you signed up to from Supreme, your pointless drug habit and your subscription to the New Statesman can’t obfuscate the bottom line here: if you’re privately educated you are a cunt*. Most private schoolboys have supported Chelsea since 2007 (this is very much related to the cunt part).

*trust me I am one of them.

Famous Example(s): Chris Martin, David Cameron, Michael McIntyre

Pseudo-Guy

Pseudo-guy is the boy who comes to university to be a man, to finally be a proper ‘grown-up’. This results in a slew of tawdry certainties: drinking shit white wine makes you better than people who drink lager, incense is brilliant and anything French is the height of sophistication ( this is how the pseud justifies cheating on whatever poor girlfriend he left at home). Slightly less knowing than the hipster, the poser is mired so deep in an acid bath of self-parody that his life is nothing more than an unceasing mega-satire, like the violence in a Paul Verhoeven movie. The poser usually studies languages or the humanities because those are the subjects with the most space to emit their special tinnitus of bullshit and self-delusion. 

Famous Example: The guy rocking the David Foster Wallace hair in this clip.

Alternate Sports Guy

You arrive at university thinking that most people who take darts/snooker/bowls seriously were born before the Second World War. Wrong. Meet alternate sports guy, who can only be dubbed ‘insane’ at pointless parlour games like squash, tiddlywinks and table tennis. Alternative sports guy’s ability in any given sport is in direct proportion to just how unpopular said sport is – the more shunned it is, the better he is at it.

Famous example: Jesus Quintana

Cocky Science Guy

Of all the truly boring things at university it is perhaps the interminable conflict between science and humanities students that is the most awful. Which is more useful? Who gets the most value for money? Who the fuck even cares? I’ll tell you who cares. Cocky science guy cares. Get a few pints down an engineer/medic/computer scientist/maths geek and watch their overconfident and overrated belief in ‘facts’ triumph over their laughable ignorance of history/literature/politics/philosophy. There is no cocky humanities equivalent who goes around telling physicists that they’re actually wrong about shifted intervals or inverted pendulums or whatever. Probably because they realise how stupid it would make them look. Cocky science guys look stupid all the time.

Famous example: Richard Dawkins

Football Guy

A curious side effect of twenty years of Premier League detoxification is the creation of the middle-class, marketing statistic, sofa football fan. Many of these guys, whose lives are defined purely in terms of #MUFC/#CFC/#NUFC, find their way to university, where they gather in packs to enjoy conversations like: “Remember Jay-Jay Okocha? – Yeah mate I do – Lol.” The ceaseless professional intensity of modern football provides a lazy kind of identity and faith (Sunday remains a holy day) for football guy to enjoy, as well as an excuse to spend his student loan on football stickers and online bets.

Famous example(s): Michael Gove, Toby Young, Hugh Grant