I love a good guided tour.

And a great group can even enhance the experience, like when I toured the former home of the famous abolitionist Frederick Douglass in Washington DC with a bunch of elderly African Americans who described growing up in segregation – the sort of impromptu living oral history that money can’t buy.

But when you get a bunch of twits – or even one particularly irksome twit? It can harsh the whole vibe. Here are the ones who really get my goat:

There’s always one. The guy who’s done the tour before, or read the book, or seen the movie, or – most irritating of all – explored the area you’re in in a different, better, more deluxe or bespoke way than the way you’re doing now. Often he’ll finish the guide’s sentences or – oh the cringe of it – correct their anecdotes.

The best cure for him is when he gets put in his place. “It’s actually been disproven that slaves built the pyramids, Neville, as you’ll see here from this very comprehensive and historian-researched signage.” It won’t guarantee Neville shuts up, of course, but at least everyone gets to have a quiet snigger.

Tour guides have heard every dumb question in the book, but it’s the culturally insensitive ones that make almost everyone in the group want the earth to open and swallow them up.

Recently I visited a significant cultural site in South Australia with an Aboriginal guide, who told our group that she gets asked some of the most dim-witted questions you could imagine. “I get asked where I find my clothes,” she said with a snort. “Um, the shops?”

Another time during a museum tour in the town of Biloxi, Mississippi, which has a long, fascinating history, the guide told me that the main thing anyone ever wanted to know about was the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, including the gory details about who many people died and how they perished.

While tours exist to educate, it’s important to remember that you’re a guest in someone else’s reality, not just gawping for entertainment. Ask questions, sure, but run a quick respect-check before you open your mouth.

Laggers come in two varietals. Either they’re hopeless wanderers who dawdle unthinkingly behind everyone else, or they get easily diverted by some interest point and decide they’re going to deep-dive into it for an extended period. The result is the same either way: they selfishly hold the rest of the group up.

It’s frustrating for the tour guests but it’s particularly disrespectful to the tour guide, who is then put into the awkward position of having to hurry the Lagger up. The good ones are trained at finding firm but friendly ways to boss them into submission but they shouldn’t have to. They don’t want to have to play bad cop. They don’t want to have to eat into the fun stuff by expending time and energy herding around fully-grown adults like kindergarteners who don’t know how to line up after recess.

Be like real grown-ups, and be consistently at the right place at the right time. 

These types are particularly endemic to any nature or adventure-based tours. I found a lot of them on a cruise to the Arctic Circle, where I spent a lot of time on deck on tip toes trying to see over the top of older, affluent men wielding cameras with foot-long lenses. I mean, cool, Alan but you still only took a pic of half a walrus tusk.

I also encountered a bunch of them on a trip to Rwanda on a jungle trek to look for chimpanzees. At the meeting spot I was joined by a bunch of very profesh-looking Austrians and Swiss, decked head-to-toe in the very latest hiking gear. I looked down sheepishly at my own daggy gym gear and sneakers and figured I was going to have a rough time of it. But once we got going, turned out that my Aussie bush-bashing experience meant I fared much better thwacking my way through the thick African jungle than they did – you don’t get a lot of gnarly tree roots or slippery mossy rocks on crisp-aired alpine mountains as far as I’m aware. Vote one for the Lorna Jane leggings.

The Tour Group Mmmmm-er is mercifully rare but by gosh they’re a nightmare when you encounter one. They’re like fingernails down a blackboard. The Mmmmm-er is exactly what their name suggests: in an effort to convey sprightly interest they emit a grating MMMMM! after every sentence the guide utters.

Look. Full marks for enthusiasm. But I wish, mightily, that they came with a mute button.

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