Sometimes the best lessons come wrapped in exhaust fumes and rock music.

After being pressured by his manager to “be a team player,” and drive his coworker to work, one engineer came up with a plan to make him never want to drive with him again.

Read on for the full story!

You demand to carpool in my car? Buckle up, cupcake!

I was working for a business as a principal firmware engineer.

The commute was an hour each way on the best days.

There were perks to driving electric.

I leased an EV which would barely get me there and home, but it was carpool-lane qualified.

A new coworker lived nearby and proposed that we carpool so we could use the carpool lane and save him maybe 20 minutes.

I wasn’t about to ride with him in his car due to his poor vision and lack of situational awareness.

So when his coworker asks, he had a quick answer.

He asked if he could ride with me in my EV.

I declined, as I didn’t need him to use the carpool lane, and his added extra bulk might exceed the limited range of that early EV.

He complained to our manager, who demanded that I accommodate him.

His manager tried to pressure them.

“Be a team player for once, don’t you know?”

So, I decided to offer carpooling with him in my pumped-up restomod ’71 Datsun 240Z on a Friday morning.

His coworker soon came to regret ever asking.

Turns out, he didn’t like the volume of my music—or the velocity of my car.

He ended up taking an Uber home that evening and never bugged me about carpooling again.

Yay team!

Not everyone is meant to be a team player, it turns out.

What did Reddit think?

This seems like a massive overstep on the manager’s part.

If the manager really insisted, then he should have paid up.

What an employee does before work should be none of the manager’s concern.

Why couldn’t the manager have just done it himself?

Nothing like a little horsepower to drive the point home.

If you liked that post, check out this post about a woman who tracked down a contractor who tried to vanish without a trace.