The list from the driver's seat

A taxi driver in Muscat can give you a long list of what is wrong with his work before you have left the hotel car park.

The car is old and the air conditioning struggles in July. The passengers haggle over a fare that was agreed before they got in. The afternoon traffic near the old town eats an hour he is not paid for. Most of it is true. Much of it is not his fault.

Complaining about all this is fair. The tools are poor, the customers are difficult and the conditions are hard, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of dishonesty.

The catch comes straight after. If the car is the problem, the car can be changed, slowly and at a cost, but changed. If the haggling passengers are the problem, there are other passengers: airport runs, regulars who book ahead, hotels that want a reliable driver on call. If the afternoon is the problem, there is the early morning and the late night. None of this is easy. It means saving, asking, waiting, starting over with people who do not know him yet. But it is possible, and once the cause has been named, the next move is his.

The other honest choice is to look at all of that and decide it is not worth it. That is allowed. Some trades are not worth making. But then the old car, the haggling and the traffic stop being an injustice. They are what he picked, and the day goes better once he stops arguing with it and drives.