How to shave seconds off your commute by being a rude, pushy arsehole

SO you’re walking through a train station and someone is coming in the opposite direction and headed right for you.

The human thing would be for you both to split difference so you don’t collide. But you’re not human you’re a timelord. You are the master of time. Stay on course. This is a game of chicken and you are going to win.

Now, imagine you’re at the platform and a train has arrived. People are lining up either side of the doors. Ignore politeness and basic physics by standing in front of the doors like a psychopath. Sure, this makes everything slower as you’re in the way of people getting off the train, but this isn’t about being literally quicker, it’s about creating a quicker ‘vibe’.

You’ve stepped onto the train, there’s space to move into, but stay close to the doors so that you can get off quickly at your stop. Don’t move, even if it stops someone else from being able to get on. If you start to feel guilty just tell yourself “Their journey is not my journey”.

Whatever you do, don’t take your rucksack off. And try to use as much space as physically possible, really stretch out. But how will that make you faster? Well it’ll piss everyone off, increasing the stress hormones in their bloodstream and in turn slowing their reactions. And if they’re slower, then what are you?

Faster!

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Six ways of showing you're still working class when you're middle class

HAVE you risen from humble origins to become part of the middle class? Do you need to remind people of that at every opportunity? Here’s how:

Support a shit football team

The middle-classes steal the authenticity from everything, but they’re too terrified of failure to support a genuinely crap team. Make a show of your loyalty to Carlisle United, Coventry City or Derby and they’ll edge away as if it’s catching.

Loudly extol the virtues of ‘proper food’

While enjoying braised partridge with polenta at a friends, repeatedly tell everyone it’ll never live up to the mushy peas, cockles in vinegar or bacon oatcakes of your youth, while never eating that stuff and shovelling in fancy gastropub dinners two-handed.

Smoke after one drink

After no more than one pint produce a packet of cigarettes from nowhere and light up while offering them around to your horrified companions, shrugging your shoulders at any cancer risk because everyone used to smoke 40 a day and they were fine.

Be sickened at how you’re spoiling your own children

Never miss an opportunity to stress how disgusted you are with the material advantages you yourself provide to your own children. “Kills me how they’re always plugged into these iPhones. I did two paper rounds for a year to buy a ZX Spectrum. 16k.”

Read the Sun for the sport

Yes the Guardian has a sports section, but you can’t fundamentally trust the views of anyone who only discovered darts watching it ironically at university. The Sun would never say that climate change was more important than Liverpool vs Chelsea, and rightly so.

Go on proper foreign holidays

None of this ‘gîte in France’ or ‘farmhouse in Tuscany’ bollocks for your family. Try three weeks in California, a week at a private beach in Jamaica or a hot-air balloon flights over the Serengeti. And you take them in term-time.

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