With a little assistance from The Chevy Source we learned of two classic jokes that have made their way through the automotive journalism ranks throughout the years.
Don’t anger the maintenance people
This prank allegedly happened at a large manufacturing plant in the South. This manufacturing plant’s head of the Quality Control (QC) department was a particularly mean person who showed little respect to the many maintenance people that he worked with. So, one day, Mr. QC drives onto company property with a beautiful new Corvette and parks it in his designated parking space. Of course, the maintenance guys notice this—and fast!–and decide a prank was in order to teach Mr. QC a manners lesson.
And this is what happened: Each day, one of the maintenance guys would slip out to the parking lot and pour a half pint of oil under the motor of his new Corvette. But, it gets even better, one of the second shift maintenance guys lived near Mr. QC and each night when he arrived home from work (in wee hours) he would also pour some oil under the car there too.
After several trips back to his local GM dealership (which you can imagine were just a touch heated), Mr. QC decided he could not take it anymore and sold that Vette. If fact, as the story goes, he never bought a GM car again. Rule of thumb for those in management: do not anger the maintenance people.
An excellent gas mileage trick
This prank is retold by a man who worked at a Volvo dealer in the early 70s. For those who don’t know about the Volvos of those years, they were very well-built but were not great on gas. As the story goes, the shop foreman decided he had enough of cars that got “poor gas mileage” and decided to purchase an ultra-thrifty Fiat 1500.
That car gave him a good deal of bragging rights in that Volvo dealership. So, the rest of the employees at the Volvo dealership decided a two-step prank had to happen. The first step was to get this new Fiat 1500 to deliver some stunning gas mileage. As a result, they decided that every few days one of the mechanics would go out to Mr. Shop Foreman’s Fiat and add some gas to the gas tank. They kept this up for several months with the result that the shop foreman was getting almost 90MPG in his vehicle. Needless to say, he bragged to everybody in sight about the 90MPG he was getting.
The second step was to just stop adding all that gas. Well, the foreman’s mileage quickly dropped from 90MPG back down to 35MPG and the poor man kept on bringing his new car back for evaluation to the local Fiat dealership. Frankly, nobody there believed for a minute that he was getting 90 MPG in the first place so they really didn’t take him seriously. Eventually, the secret slipped that he had been duped by his co-workers and, let us say, he wasn’t too happy.
