So, a guy wrote a post explaining "How to Talk to a Woman Who is Wearing Headphones" that was filled with lines like this:
You: [Add in some humor to get her smiling and create a spark between you] Cool…nice to meet you Jessica. I don’t normally talk to girls with headphones, but your big green headphones were just calling out to me.
Woman: [Possibly smiling or laughing].
Despite being larded up with amazing advice like the above, the essay was met with much derision on the Internet. Deserved derision, to be quite honest. It's so terrible I half-suspect it's a giant troll of some mystifying sort.
Anyway, you shouldn't talk to a strange woman who is wearing headphones. Obviously you shouldn't do this. This is something that sociopaths do. People don't wear headphones in the city because they're listening to the latest hippity hop album or swing jazz or whatever it is the kids listen to these days (the "podcasts," apparently): No, they're wearing headphones because it's city shorthand for "leave me alone." If someone is wearing headphones on a subway car or a bus or even just walking down the street, they might as well be holding up a sign that says "I don't want to talk to you, would you kindly jump into traffic/grab the third rail with your mouth if you even thought about talking to me."
This has been positioned as a sexism thing—for good reason, honestly; I have no doubt that attractive women are bothered by strangers far more frequently than lumps like your humble narrator—but, really, it's just a human thing. I mean, I've lost track of the number of times some jagoff wearing a Greenpeace shirt not only tried to talk to me but kind of slightly stepped in front of me to block my passage. I don't care about the gotdang whales! I take a very Muntzian POV on those that Greenpeace would defend:
So pandhandlers/Greenpeace activists/Human Rights Campaign knobs: If you see a person wearing headphones, leave them be! They don't want to be bothered by you. I realize your job blows, but you made poor choices; don't make me pay for them.
Also: If you enter an elevator and you see someone on their phone, checking their email or writing a tweet or just staring blankly at it with their mouth agape like a hominid before the monolith, don't ask them how their day was. Don't make chit chat. Don't joke about how we all just stare at screens. This happened to me the other day in my office elevator and I was half-horrified, half-disgusted by the breach in etiquette. How dare this woman try to banter with me when I'm obviously trying to ignore her. I don't care how your day went, lady. I will literally never, ever, ever care how your day went.
If you bother someone who is reading a book—or a Kindle or a New Yorker or a frigging porno mag, I don't care, just something they're holding in their hands as a way to keep from having to interact with the garbage of humanity that surrounds them—you should be executed on the spot. No trial, no nothing. I would pay 10% higher local taxes for a police force dedicated solely to this.
This goes double for people who try to talk to strangers in a movie theater. Or people who talk to the screen. You monsters are unfit to live in human society.
If you talk to someone you don't know in the gym, they should be allowed to have you permanently banned from the premises. "Oh yes, I would love to have a chat with you, stranger, that's why I came here. Perhaps we could wait until we're 30 percent sweatier before resuming this dialogue on Hobbes and Rousseau? Great, wonderful, see you in ten."
Don't talk to strangers in a restaurant. I don't care if I'm sitting at the bar by myself, eating alone because I have no friends and am "sad looking." I look sad because I spend all my time thinking about the terrible people who go around talking to strangers. You are why I drink alone.
Don't talk to strangers at work. I don't care if you're coworkers: Unless you have to do a task with this person, they aren't interested in being anywhere near you, nor should you be in them.
Don't talk to anyone. Ever. Talking is awful. People are worse. It's hard to imagine a more horrifying combination than talking to people.