Aside from sounding like a painfully bad Swedish indie band, the nods are something you’ll all encounter as students.
Their seeds are sown in freshers’ week. Keen to make sure they don’t end up living alone in their second year and inspired by horribly positive student guides in the Guardian, students come to university and try to talk to everyone they possibly can. Bless.
What they don’t know is that it’s more than likely that they will never speak to these people ever again.
I mean ever.
In fact they’ll probably spend the rest of their university career avoiding them. Planning ones route back home from university to avoid these nods are not long coming and they will happily spend an extra twenty minutes in the library not to have any awkward meet ups on Oxford Road.

The OED defines a nod as “A relationship with a person solely consisting of a series of nodding actions upon meeting”. Indeed, the nod is the horrid refuse of freshers’ week. (Aside from the series of free holes you get with the cheap condoms in the freshers pack) It’s a relationship that isn’t developed enough to warrant conversation but one that hasn’t degraded enough to warrant a straight blank. And you’ll never escape it. Unless you get to know them better. But that will reduce the time you spend in the dark, alone in your room and everyone likes that time.

The nods aren’t nice. They’re awkward, socially unpleasant and can give you neck crick if you do it too much. It also means that you’ll need to keep yourself in a permanent state of readiness lest you pass a nodding buddy in the street.

In order to prevent this disease, you have to go back to the root of the problem; Freshers week and student guides. Now as we can’t legally firebomb newspaper offices to stop the latter, we’re just going to have to help you with the former.
Because we’re nice people and God knows we don’t want any randoms talking to us that week, we’ve included a printable emergency kit.
It’s your one stop bit of gear in avoiding the nods.

Dismiss these cheap freebies at your own cost.
You might end up talking to one of us if you do.

Item 1. A name badge
Eliminates the need for those awkward three questions on first meeting.
Also include an interesting fact so if you enjoy Star Trek people can instantly avoid you without having to know your name, course and place of birth first.

Item 2. ‘Bitey’ the Spider
Cut out spider and attach to your person.
Call it bitey and suggest people pet it.
Admire at the number of people avoiding eye contact with you in the bar or swimming pool.

If the worst comes to the worst and you don’t use our nod prevention kit, then try this handy disguise to avoid people recognising you.

Unless you look like Groucho Marx in the first place.