Remember the Seinfeld episode where Jerry was trying to rent a car and they didn’t honor his reservation?

Yeah, it’s a classic!

And this story reminded me of that episode…

Check out how this rental car company worker maliciously complied in a clever way when things got heated at work.

You demand that we honor your reservation? Sure thing!

“A few years back, I worked at one of the big car rentals in a rather small city in Germany.

We had two offices, one in the outskirts with quite a sizable lot and a very small one at the train station (4 official parking spots in front of the office, about 6 parking spots at the other end of the train station at the staff parking lot we used to not get into trouble for using parking spots we didn’t pay for).

That one was a bit of a prestige thing because it enabled us to serve our business customers right when they got off the train.

Both offices worked closely together, even sharing a vehicle pool within the booking software and we were expected to move the cars around accordingly.

Things ran smoothly…usually…

The business at the train station followed a pattern that would repeat every week.

Every Monday, business customers would arrive by train, pick up their car to get to their clients during the week and drop them off by the end of the week to leave by train again.

Most would drop the car off on Thursday.

One week, we could already see disaster approaching by the middle of the previous week. Due to some error in the booking software and some cars spontaneously not returning to our offices, our car pool stood at -60 for Monday at the train station office.

See, that’s not unusual on a Monday, the problem was that overall, our shared car pool stood at -15.

Since we are quite small and only a franchise of the car rental company, there was no way we would get extra cars from bigger stations, so we started trying to reach out to business customers to inform them that we most likely couldn’t serve all reservations and if we could maybe cancel on them.

Some understood while some insisted and even more were not available when we tried to contact them.

They had to step up.

On Friday, my supervisor asked me if I could cover the shift at the train station office on Monday because she knew the colleague who was supposed to would mentally break if yelled at by customers.

I knew it would be hell but knowing that she would have the morning shift at the main office, we were sure we could make it work somehow.

I asked to also work on Sunday at the train station office to make sure all cars were ready for the next day since we had around 70 reservations between 6 am and 11 am that day.

So I worked my Sunday shift, got everything prepared as far as I could and went home.

On Monday, we opened at 6 am. I got in at 5:30 like always and there was already a small line queued up in front of the door.

I told them we don’t open until 6 and they accepted it. Everything went sort of smoothly until about 8:30 am.

All my cars were gone and I received a somewhat steady supply of cars from the main office until then.

I constantly kept my supervisor updated with a list of my reservations and which cars from the main office I’d like to have for that and she tried to make it work.

It was gonna be a long day…

Then she calls me to tell me that she is also out of cars due to some having to be off-fleeted due to mileage or simply not returning. I knew everything would go to shambles after that and mentally prepared for it.

I started telling customers that we couldn’t possibly serve their reservations. Most understood due to the fact that I didn’t have any cars in front of my office but a few insisted that they get their cars.

Cue malicious compliance.

I called my supervisor and told her that some clients insisted on getting a move on NOW and no matter how. After some short venting on her side, we came up with an idea.

They had an idea…

We might not have any cars anymore but had an incredible excess of moving vans (Mercedes Sprinter, VW Crafter and such) that we didn’t really need any of.

Now, the train station office isn’t supposed to rent out vans but we found a workaround for that.

The transfer drivers had a company car that could be rented out so I checked it in at my station, created the rental agreement with that, switched my view to the main office and initiated a vehicle switch.

Hey, that worked out!

All without ever having a physical car at my station. So the rental agreement was completed and the transfer drivers started bringing our white company-branded moving vans down to my office.

I even told one especially insistent customer that I was able to fulfill his wish for an automatic transmission diesel.

I will never forget the look on the face of this suit-wearer when he realized he will be driving in a moving van to his client.

The train station office satisfaction rating took quite the beating after this but we didn’t really care about that since we rarely got bonuses down there anyway.”

Let’s see what folks had to say on Reddit.

This person had a lot to say.

Another Reddit user wasn’t impressed.

This individual spoke up.

Another person shared their thoughts.

And this reader weighed in.

That’s called ‘thinking on your feet!’

These customers had reason to be upset, though.

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