For me, the most hated question is any opener that leads to someone asking for money. For example:
“Do you have a watch?”
“It’s three fifty.”
“Lots of good things will happen to you—I can see it. Let me read your palm.”
Whenever strangers ask questions like that, I instinctively pick up my pace and don’t respond. For some reason, the most common one I hear is about the time—or, more specifically, whether I have a watch.
It’s trickier when people ask for directions. That one still fools me sometimes.
“Hey, how do I get to the National Theater?”
“Right this way,” I say, pointing in the right direction.
“Do you want a flower for health?”
I don’t mind when people ask for change—it’s their job. But using trivial questions as an opener makes me a worse person because I might end up walking past someone who genuinely needs help.
Since I aim for 10,000 steps a day, I have plenty of encounters with strangers—maybe once or twice a week. Most of the time, it’s just people struggling to find something that’s supposed to be there according to Google Maps but isn’t.
Veselin.blog 
People start with the watch question?
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It’s strange, right? In the age of smartphones.
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The worst one for me is the “How are you?”. I understand it is used a polite way to greet someone, and that it is not a question at all. If it was a question, are people really interested in how you are, and at the same time, it is polite to start sharing thing when you are not “good, I’m fine”. A nice witty way to reply to “How are you?” is “Better than I expected” =)
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Why? In Bulgaria, that’s an invitation to complain and receive empathy. Complaining is our national sport 🙂
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Maybe you could say “C’mon, let’s walk and talk. I only have (look at watch) 9,400 steps left.”
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This is evil 👿 but genius
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Good job
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