UKC

that you do see  / find, so, no 'tigers' or 'blokes with pointed sticks poking your rear end to get you up the route'

I'll start with badly controlled kids groups running around under high bouldering overhangs. 

Routes more than 3 months old.

Uneven or pitted matting

People 

Those bouncy, jumpy boulder problems with nothing to hold on them! 

Any competition involving fancy dress or those neon light things.

Route setters who think that the way you make routes easier/harder is just varying the hold size.

Ropes.

:P

Mexicans.

Or just putting them further apart.

Overzealous staff members.

Unwanted and unrequested beta.

But by far the most annoying ever (years ago now) a patronising  member of staff who approached me and my climbing partner : we were both about twice the staff members age.  We hadn't been in for a while and were a bit out of shape , the member of staff proceeded to offer us completely unnecessary advice on our perfectly competently tied knots presumably because he hadn't seen us at his wall before , thought we were beginners and would therefore be in awe of his "expertise". I looked at him in disbelief and asked what was wrong with it, he agreed my knot was indeed fine  but added condescendingly that he didn't want me to hurt myself. At the time I suspect the last routes partner and I had completed together were Point Five and The Old Man Of Hoy.

My partner had in fact been one of the demonstration climbers at the opening of the wall in question. 

That still annoys me...can you tell?I

edit typo

To the disliker.
Wall and Mexicans...

 

I got the joke.

Less contemporary but more historic...

Alert guards with guns

Witnessed a similar exchange at my local wall

Young member of staff: Are you sure that knot is correct?

Very experienced climber: Well it worked OK on the Salathe Wall

YMS: They may have different rules there. All companies are different

House, garage, rap, hip hop, drum and bass or any other such patterned noise masquerading as music.

Prelude No. 15 in D-flat major, Op. 28 by

Frédéric Chopin

Is my go to bouldering tune.

Crush it to classical

Comment of the year in my books. 

David Hasselhoff

People in head to toe outdoor gear and a pack on - wander around a lot but never seem to climb anything

’oh I’m just back/going to blah blah’ 

From my local wall:

A large chunk of the best part of the wall removed and replaced with autobelay games for children.

Boot camp style training sessions complete with terrible loud music and shouty instructor.

A regular email that includes loads of information that I have no interest in whatsoever, and none of the information that would actually be useful. So I turn up and find half the wall closed for a refurb. When I ask why they hadn't mentioned ​it on the newsletter I'm told "We put it on Facebook". 

How t.f. are you supposed to look at some bloke you've never seen before messing around with a rope and know he's a trad megahero?

I think that is tied to the 'obscure nitpicking' thread; some people just don't seem able to say 'yes, absolutely fine, no problems' and invent spurious issues ('your stopper knot needs more tail' being another recent favourite of mine) that their ego trip dictates.

While this mostly is just overzealousness or staff who've only been taught one way, if someone says there's something wrong with your knot at least *look* at it with the view that there might actually be something wrong with it even if you conclude it isn't.  Even the most experienced people make the occasional mistake.

I don't get why age makes any difference to this kind of thing.  Plenty of people take up climbing in their later years.  Age does not necessarily dictate experience - it gives more opportunity to have gained it, of course, but in a modern wall it's not unlikely you'll have a 50 year old who's just started and a 25 year old who's been up all sorts of stuff the world over climbing next to each other.

A sensible question (as I think the first person to comment this said) is "what's wrong with it?" - that way you can establish if they're just being silly/overzealous/patronising or not.

Still just noise in patterns, the real purist needs to only listen to the random, out of time smashing on a triangle only a small child can offer.

Seconding Billy whizz at lawrencefield in 1982, the guys on pool wall had a beach boys greatest hits on cassette.  Quite enjoyable at the time but I've since grown to be a grumpy auld bugger if I hear any music in the hills.

Good choice, funnily enough I was playing that very piece on the piano last night before I went to bed

After bouldering for years at Alter rock in the old days .

COLD !!!!!

It was colder than the fridge .  No joke.  

You could stand around the fridge to keep warm .

;-D

Water dripping down the wall. Anyone else remember SIDS wall? 

insufficient height for leading (I don't really do bouldering)

Bad light

Too hot/cold

Boringly set and infrequently changed routes

Further than cycling distance of my house

Over a tenner and without a carnet option.

Silly opening hours

Narrow variety of hold types; plain ply surface

Space given over to cafe, changing, competitions, gear shop, bouldering, viewing galleries, water features in the foyer, etc.

But I think I told you this already?

Drum and bass is the only music they should be playing.

No - The best thing to do is get your smartass reply in, then turn your back and surreptitiously check you knot

That also works to be fair.

Easy.  He'll have a beard, some heavily UV damaged cord as prussiks on the back of his harness, he'll spend ages locked off to have a good feel of the best bit of the next hold, probably wont do anything dynamic and will know where the nearest place you can get real ale is.   

This should help:

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/b6/34/61/b634618af3723be83a57982ae2bd8ede.pn...

Hand driers that shatter your ear drums.

Staff that deliberately try and ignore you if you dare to try and order a cup of tea 10 minutes before the café closes (which is when most people typically finish an after work climbing session).

Above are based on my experiences at my local bouldering wall, which is otherwise excellent.

A book?
A pamphlet at best!

Phones on mats. Anyone who leaves their phone on the mat should a. have their phone confiscated, b. be banned from the wall and c. be cast out into the wilderness for all time.

I think you missed the laugh here. The funny part was not that our eager young whippersnapper  did not recognise a bowline  but that his knowledge/experience was  so limited that he assumed the Salathe Wall must be just another climbing wall rather than part of one of the most famous cliffs on the planet. Now do you geddit?

I did get that bit

People who are much better at climbing than me

People who are much worse at climbing than me

Any rules about enforcing what type of belay device you can and can't use

Manky old walls that are clearly 20+ years old

(Though the Salathe wall is getting pretty old now, they should refurb that)

Should definitely reset it once a month

Better than than just varying the distance between them! 

Being big, tall and thuggy I quite like a thuggy spaced out jug ladder - but yes, there should probably be more thought put into things than that, e.g. a harder route will usually only have one way of doing the moves, vs an easier one can be done in lots of ways.

I once set a pair of routes on a wall in Islamabad, using similar but smaller holds for one of them but placing them in precisely the same relative spots in the grid, i.e. every hold on the harder red route was exactly 30cm left of a slightly larger hold on the easier blue route. It actually worked out really well and there were only a couple of moves that ended up climbing substantially differently between the two.

Actually that was maybe 9 years ago and I wouldn't be at all surprised to find they're still up, given that they fixed the holds in place with nuts from the back of the wall so they would never move! That's as long as the wall itself hasn't fallen down yet!

SIDS: happy days (especially when the ice formed). And no mats.

Good man!

Overly complicated joining systems.

Where I just want to boulder as I'm here for one evening is a monumental task as I said yes I can lead climb and belay. 

Bloody ipads

Bear Grylls

No way. Good uplifting techno, electronica e.g. Bicep or Rival Consoles

Less classic rock. I'm not on a road trip with Jeremy Clarkson.

I'm hoping you'll make an exception for Pink Floyd's "The Wall"

Movin' on up  

Good quality mid grade boulders - and a variety of 'em from parcour style to crimpy 'old mans routes'

Smartphones! Starting to get fed up with having to avoid people filming each other at the bouldering wall for their Instabrag.

I don't overly mind filming, but people climbing with smartphones in their pocket raises a risk of it falling out of their pocket while doing an awkward move and smacking their belayer on the head, which as helmets are not conventionally worn at walls would be rather undesirable in its results.  Only thing I have in my pocket while climbing is my asthma inhaler.

Outdoor shoes on the wall / Mats

Dirty tw*ts climbing in bare feet.

Their feet won't be any worse than their hands.

But rock shoes that were last week standing in Kalymnos goat poo are fine.

I think it's safer not to lick the holds.

Or their climbing shoes after a visit to the urinals.

Yeah, why is it that at climbing walls people seem to stand 6 foot away from the troughs and shower the floor?  It's far worse than anywhere else.

Don't want to stand on someone else's piss in their climbing shoes, 'cause that'll transfer germs on to the holds, init.

narcissistic routesetters with huge egos

Apart from the veruccas, athlete's foot fungal infections, boot sweat rot etc

Most people don't have verrucae, and if you're bothered about the rest of those I'd suggest a climbing wall is probably not the place for you.  They are not clean places pretty much by definition.

I don't climb barefoot, but I don't see why I'd care if someone did.

That unsolicited beta bloke with the ponytail at the wall I used to go to. Used to sidle up to anyone even looking at a problem and tell them how to it. Drove me mad. 

Oh! and I thought you were pleased to see me .

Is this the stuff that sounds like a recording of a fire at a zoo, with a pounding bass?

Maybe we should get 1 three and half minute track each....