I have this thing with people who waste my time.  I had to get to a meeting this morning, so I had to leave the hotel by a certain time.  There's one other person on travel with me right now, so we were traveling together in the same rental car.  So I show up at the car at the time we're supposed to meet, and he's not there.  No problem.  Yet.  I wait a few minutes, and he's still not there.  Since it's first thing in the morning, I start thinking that he could've missed his alarm and overslept or something like that, so I walk to his room (which wasn't very close).  Just as I reach the door, he's walking out and ready to go.  I say hey.  He says hey.  Nothing else.  No "Sorry I'm 10 minutes late and might make us late for the meeting," no "I hope this doesn't ruin your career seeing that everyone will be watching as we walk in late."  Nothing like that.  Why do people think it's ok to be unreliable? 

While I'm on the subject of wasting my time, there's a guard shack at work.  On most mornings, I drive up, show him my ID without even opening my window, and he motions to drive through.  But recently, he made me stop my car and roll down my window, and he looked at my ID more closely.  Then he asked me to take it out of the little plastic case.  Then he took it from my hand.  Then he looked at the back of it.  Then he gave it back to me and motioned for me to go through.  Since this was an utter waste of time, it made me a little mad.  [Note:  For those of you who don't know, the easiest and best way to make me mad is to do something in the morning.  I always wake up in the morning feeling like I got about 15 minutes of sleep, so everything on earth gets to me.]  It was obvious that this guy's supervisor told him to look more closely at IDs.  I'm fine with that.  Do what you're told.  But I'd like to talk to that supervisor who thought it would be a good idea to casually glance at the back of an ID.  What were you expecting to find?  This same thing happened another time.  It happened to be raining harder than I've ever seen in my life.  It was about 7:40 am.  The guy at the guard shack made me open my window and take my ID out of the case, all the while rain was pouring in my window and onto me.  I was pretty psyched that morning. 

How about cops?  One of my friends is becoming a state cop.  God bless him.  I can't stand cops.  And it's not because they keep fining me for breaking the law.  It's because they do things that not only waste my time, they waste everyone's time and actually cause more problems than they solve.  Here's a bright idea:  let's set up a road block on Route 15 so that we can check if people are wearing their seat belts.  This was done by the cops in Dover.  I understand that seat belts save lives and that safety is important.  Just don't waste my time.  And how about this idea:  let's pull people over on the highway during rush hour traffic.  Let's park our squad car in the middle of an intersection and direct traffic.  Let's pull people over and park our squad car so it juts out into the road. 

And finally, I come to tolls.  Getting past the stupid idea that tolls are needed to pay for road improvements and upkeep because regular taxes don't pay for that, I still have a problem with tolls.  On the beautiful and wonderful Garden State Parkway in lovely and affordable and spacious (not overcrowded) New Jersey, tollbooths pop up every few miles.  My question is this:  What idiot came up with the idea to cause a stop in the regular flow of traffic traveling at 70 mph so that people can slow down to 0 mph, line up and pay to use the road?  EZPass is a great invention.  High Speed EZPass is even better.  What on earth took them so long to come up with that?  One day, some engineers sat down and said, "Hmm, these tolls seem to be causing traffic.  What if there was a way to collect a toll without having people slow down?  We could collect tolls when people exit the highway.  Nah!  That's what the Turnpike people did."  And thus we have High Speed EZPass, the long-sought-after solution to a made up solution to a non-existent problem. #lifestyle