As you gain experience in a job, you develop strong gut feelings about your profession. Whether it’s the work you do or the people you work with, you learn to read situations before they happen because you’ve seen the same scenario play out time and time again.

This gut feeling can transform into an innate ability to read people because you’ve seen a version of them thousands of times before—whether it’s dealing with salespeople, students, customers, patrons at a bar or restaurant, or patients in a healthcare space. 

Recently, a Redditor asked on the Ask Reddit subforum, “People whose job is to read strangers for a living (poker dealers, bartenders, TSA agents, loss prevention): what’s the tell you clock in the first 10 seconds that people don’t realize they’re broadcasting?”

The post went viral, earning nearly 6,000 responses from people across various industries, from insurance to customer service. The common takeaway is that they see the same types of people every day and have a keen eye for spotting those who are up to no good.

Here are nine ways that people in various professions have learned to read strangers.

1. There’s no ‘no reason’

“Family law attorney here: when a potential client explains something with ‘and then for NO REASON’ … there’s always a reason, and it is usually because that person did something shi**y.”

“A jaded EMT I knew once used the term SOCMOB for people who got themselves injured in dubious circumstances. ‘And there I was, Standing On the Corner, Minding MY OWN BUSINESS.’”

“I’m a doctor, and we’d call it ‘night church.’ Amazing how many people were coming home from church at 2 am then getting jumped out of nowhere.”

“I used to work at the return desk at Target, and I could tell who was going to yell at me based on how they........

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