On a trip to Russia in 1989, I was on my way to a Russian journalist's office in downtown Moscow for a chat.

I was using Moscow's subway to get there. At some point, I became lost. Totally, completely and utterly lost.

The subway map, was, unhelpfully, in Cyrillic text (damn those Russians).

I didn't know where I was, where I was going, or how to get back to where I started.

Standing in front of the map on the subway car and frustrated as hell, I blurted out a "FUCK!!" and gave the map one hard shot with the bottom of my clenched left hand.

This had the phlegmatic Muscovites on the car looking at me out of the corner of their eyes.

One man approached me. "Vat is problem?" he asked warily, in Russian-accented English.

I told him. He showed me where I was, where I had to go for my appointment and how to get there.

Problem solved, stress evaporated, tantrum gone! :)

As a police reporter in Fort McMurray, Alta. in the late 1980s, I got to know the local constabulatory reasonably well. One cop in particular struck me as a decent guy in low-stress situations, but this sentence from him summed up his problem in high-stress ones: "It's a war out there, and you can't lose."

This guy laid a disproportionate number of charges such as obstruction or assaulting a police officer when compared to his peers. I suspect his them-or-me attitude made his job more difficult than it had to be.

While most police officers are decent people doing an exceedingly difficult job, and there are mercifully few genuine creeps in the mix, I think a big part of the problem when conflicts erupt are the scaredy-cat cops.