When you work in a job where you have to drive around to different locations each day, the place you have to go can make a huge difference in your work.

What would you do if you found out that a co-worker was always pushing the worst locations to you, which made your day worse and cost you money in bonuses?

That is what happened to the copier repair man in this story, so he pulled a prank on the co-worker that kept him off the road.

Check it out.

Clutch cable petty revenge

This is an old work war story from 1993.

When I was first starting to work full-time the job market wasn’t so great.

The only full-time work I could get was as a copier repair man.

So I took a job with a large local copier company in the service department.

During training, and for the first month they made me ride along with different techs to get a feel for the job.

During this month I rode with 4 different techs one each week.

The first guy I worked with was named Dave.

Seemed like a nice enough guy, and he seemed to know what he was doing.

So we worked together that week, and got along fine with no issues.

Something fishy is going on here.

The next week they had me work with a guy named Rich.

Rich was really cool and down to earth.

We got along great, and Rich asked if I had worked with Dave the week before.

So I said yeah he seems nice enough.

He said wait until you get out in the field on your own you will see what he’s really like.

The next two techs I rode with the following two weeks said the same things about Dave.

This is a good policy.

Now I usually give people the benefit of the doubt.

Getting warnings from three different guys all about the same guy though set off my spidey sense.

So, this was back in the day before cell phones were common, and we had text pagers.

So you would get a page with a message to go to a service call, and the serial number of the machine would be in the message.

So, you had to carry around a book of all the machines in your service area, and look up the serial number to get the address.

About two months after I started I got a service call for a machine not in my book.

In that event you would have to call into dispatch, and get the info.

Those long calls would be awful.

The call is made to get the info, and the machine is about a 90 minute drive one way from where I am.

So, it’s going to be pretty much half the day on one call.

With three hours of driving there and back.

Drove to the place found the machine, fixed the problem, and drove back.

This cycle would repeat about twice a week or so.

Well, our pay was dependent on the number calls that we did.

The more calls you did without a callback the bigger your bonus.

After a month of these calls we had our next monthly service meeting, and I voiced my problem with sending me to service calls that were three hours of driving and out of my territory.

It turns out the machines were in Super Dave’s territory.

He should be fired for manipulating the system.

Super Dave didn’t want to have to do certain calls, and knew how to work the system.

As a tech you could call into dispatch and have them send a call to another tech, or from another tech to yourself.

Now it was clear why the other guys warned me about him. Now I also knew how to deal with his BS.

When the next month’s service meeting came around I decided to give Super Dave a little petty revenge.

That morning I stopped at the auto parts store and bought a 3 pack of bungee cords.

Super Dave drove a 1992 Ford Ranger with a 5 speed.

So I waited for him to pull up in his truck, and go into the branch.

I crawled up under his truck and hooked the bungee cords around his clutch cable, and the other end to one of the exhaust hangers.

This basically made it so when he tried to push in the clutch it would be extremely difficult, and because of the safety switch, he can’t start his truck without pushing in the clutch.

This would have been fun to see.

So I told my buddies in the branch to stick around after the meeting, and we would see Super Dave struggling to get his truck started.

He hit the roof of the truck with his head trying to push in the clutch.

We were all dying laughing inside the branch.

I don’t think he ever figured out who did it.

It was nothing destructive and could easily be removed, but it was petty revenge.

Well done! This guy sounds like a jerk who was costing everyone money.

Read on to see what the people in the comments think about this.

Hmm, maybe it was a different year.

Hopefully it got Dave to change.

I’m sure Dave continued to do this.

Super Dave was a jerk.

If you mistreat your co-workers, expect revenge.

At least this revenge was pretty harmless.

If you liked that post, check out this one about an employee that got revenge on HR when they refused to reimburse his travel.