You want me to carpool in my one-charge EV? Buckle up, cupcake.

Manager: “You’ll carpool.” Me (quietly, like a firmware patch): sure — that’s a very specific demand.

Principal firmware engineer, one-hour commute each way on a good day, leased an EV that will—on a benevolent Tuesday—just make the round trip. Key fact: it qualifies for the carpool lane. Key request: bring a new coworker every day. That’s not a request; that’s a logistics bug filed against my personal time and battery management.

Inventory (for the lab notebook): 1) an EV with range that reads like a dare, 2) a manager with jurisdiction ambitions, 3) a coworker who did not sign an NDA about seat allocation. As one helpful commenter put it: “I don’t see how a manager could demand that you include a coworker in your commute.” Translation: you can suggest policy; you cannot reassign private fuel economy.

Options floated by the peanut gallery were surgical: bill hourly + mileage (accounting for emotional depreciation), or make the coworker never want a ride again (a passive-aggressive UX test). Another chorus wanted photos of a ’71 Datsun, which is internet shorthand for “put them in something that smells like character and see who lasts.”

Mic-drop: if management can mandate personal logistics, then compliance becomes a debug tool — meet the policy exactly as written, and watch it fail wonderfully. Sometimes the cleanest fix is a quiet adherence so grotesquely literal it becomes policy’s own error message. Buckle up, cupcake.