Cyclist vs bus driver, city road

I had a break from couriering for four months. When I came back to it I loved it; I'd missed riding, missed seeing so much of the city, missed the comradeship. Now it's beginning to get me down a bit and the reason is the daily, hourly, unremitting stupidity and selfishness of people; drivers mainly but pedestrians too and other cyclists. Add all the I-had-this-incident/near miss posts on here in a week, or even in a month, and you have an average day for a courier. Imagine you nearly get knocked off, or do get knocked off, on your commute to work; then, when you get there, the person next to you in the office keeps bumping their chair in to you or throwing scissors at your head and when you ask him not to he calls you a cunt. It's like that.
So, in that respect, think yourselves lucky that your experiences are so relatively rare. The other side of this is that when it happens so often your response to it has to change; no one has the energy to get so angry over and over again. By and large you have to let most incidents pass unremarked upon or with your only remark being a meaningful look.
I have tried to develop a pragmatic approach; if the aim is to get the other person to realise what they have done (and so often they genuinely have no idea that they have done anything wrong) and to make them understand why what they did was dangerous then screaming anger is hardly ever going to be effective. If the aim is just to express the rage you rightfully feel then go ahead but you will never convince me it is mainly to do with trying to improve that person's driving/riding/walking. Sometimes I lose my rag and shout an insult but I always regret it; for one thing, as I said, they really may have no clue what I am shouting about so all they know is that some dick of a cyclist just called them a twat.
Talking to the offending person calmly - and telling them what they did wrong and why it was dangerous - obviously won't always get a friendly or agreeable response. But quite often it does, more often than you would think. And even if they don't accept your point there and then they may well, later, when they have calmed down, see the value of it. Generally I think they often feel guilty and ashamed or just stressed out with city life and this comes out as defensiveness. There are the few screaming, mouth-frothing psychos too but I don't see how my point would get through to them any more effectively if we match each other cunt for cunt and decibel for decibel.
The kind of infuriating incidents that get talked about on here happen to me (and all other couriers) so often that I can't be bothered to detail them any more. But over a long time and through a lot of experience I have concluded that even when you are totally in the right it's better, more pragmatic, to swallow your pride and try and explain to the other person what they did and why you didn't like it than to shout and swear. And I am not a patient, easy going person; turning the other cheek is not my natural reaction but if that is what it takes to have an effect on someone else's potentially lethal behaviour then I will do it. It's a strategy.
However, as I say, it is getting me down a bit. Nine or ten hours a day of this crap would test the patience of a Schick.