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.