After His Manager Insisted He Provide Transportation, One Engineer Complied By Giving His Coworker A Wild Ride That Made The Point Clearly
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Carpooling stops being friendly when management turns it into an order.
One engineer declined because his early electric car had very limited range.
His manager demanded that he accommodate the coworker anyway.
A different vehicle solved the argument.
Let’s see how this one played out.
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?
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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.
If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a delivery driver who, after being scolded for ignoring parking policies, decides to maliciously comply himself into some serious overtime.
Why couldn’t the manager have just done it himself?
This engineer offered a ride in his loud, fast 1971 sports car after management demanded he become a team player.
The uncomfortable coworker took an Uber home and never asked to carpool again.
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