What are the things that make me mad? I found myself to be particularly upset today during a stressful experience where another incompetent taxi driver sabotaged the plans of my mother and I to get to a boat trip around the Nice harbor, which would have been enjoyable, but it was not to be, despite our leaving considerably more time than necessary–though ultimately not enough for the taxi driver to arrive at the hotel in a timely fashion. The combination of low sleep–I had about an hour of sleep last night as I was unable to sleep for most of the night–along with people wasting my time and money put me in a rather fierce mood, and it is worthwhile to reflect on the ways that one may be vulnerable to feel especially upset if one wishes to control one’s behavior and attitudes.

How are the ways that people can be thieves? Sometimes people can be thieves in a direct sense in pillaging one’s possessions, but that does not exhaust the ways that people can be thieves. Some people can be thieves of time, wasting one’s time through their refusal to act in appropriate ways. As is often the case, people are sensitive to the way that their own time is being wasted through intransigent or lazy behavior, but it is harder for us to be reflective of the way that we rob from others. We can even rob from others by failing to take responsibility or accept for things that are really under our control or authority. This is common when people outsource unpleasant tasks and then seek to outsource the accountability and responsibility for such tasks as well, which is something that one can see.

As I was reflecting in the aftermath of dealing with a couple of cases of broken promises about the timing of transportation from our hotel, I came to the thought that they simply did not value our time enough to make it a priority to save our own. However much the hotel might seek to justify itself, it would have done far better to simply accept that their own behavior needed improvement and then to go around and improve it.

I also had occasion to reflect on why taxi drivers are such thieving sorts of people? What is it that leads to the sort of aggressive incompetence that results on the part of the taxi drivers I have seen in both Casablanca and the Cote d’Azul, and in both cases there are some similar patterns. Perhaps most telling was that both taxi drivers had ulterior motives that led them to disdain simply doing what the customer wanted because they had it in mind to make far more money leading a more distant tour for hundreds of dollars of profits. When taxi drivers and other customer-facing jobs forget that their job is not to try to enlist potential customers to satisfy their own longings but rather to serve the interests of those customers, then trouble frequently follows, along with thievery of both money and time.