She humiliated me in front of my boss, accusing me of cheating in the office parking lot. She didn’t realize that her tantrum would lead the cops straight to the illegal tracking device she hid on my car.
It was 5:30 PM on a Tuesday, and it was pouring rain. I was walking to my car when I saw “Emily,” a new hire in our accounting department, standing helplessly next to her sedan. She had a flat tire and no idea how to change it.
I did what any decent human being would do. I told her to wait in her dry car while I swapped it out for the spare. I was soaked to the bone, kneeling in a puddle, wrestling with a rusted lug nut.
That’s when the screeching tires started.
The Ambush
My girlfriend, Jessica, pulled up behind us in her SUV, blocking the exit. She didn’t park; she abandoned the vehicle. She stormed over, screaming before she even reached us.
“I knew it!” she shrieked. “I knew you were screwing her!”
I stood up, holding a tire iron, completely confused. “Jessica? I’m changing a tire. She’s my coworker.”
“Don’t lie to me!” she yelled, slapping the tire iron out of my hand. “You’re down on your knees for her? In the rain? You think I’m stupid?”
The Audience
The commotion was so loud that the lobby security guard came out. Then, my boss, Mr. Henderson, walked out to see what was happening.
“Is everything alright here?” Mr. Henderson asked, eyeing Jessica warily.
“No!” Jessica screamed at him. “Your employee is a cheater! He’s using company time to hook up with this… this tramp!”
Emily was crying in her car. I was mortified. I tried to calm Jessica down, but she was manic. She kicked Emily’s bumper. Security called the police.
The Tracker
When the officers arrived, they separated us. Jessica was hyperventilating, telling them I was abusive and unfaithful. I was explaining the situation to a skeptical officer.
“Look,” I said, pointing to the half-changed tire. “I was just helping her. I don’t know how Jessica even knew I was still here. I usually leave at 5:00.”
The officer paused. “She didn’t call you?” “No.”
The officer walked over to my car. He shined his flashlight into the wheel well of the rear tire—the one I had been kneeling next to while getting the spare out of the trunk nearby. He reached in and pulled out a small, black magnetic box. It was dangling by a piece of duct tape that had come loose in the rain.
“Is this yours?” he asked. “No,” I said.
He walked over to Jessica. “Ma’am, did you place a GPS tracker on this vehicle?”
The Meltdown
Jessica’s face went pale, then red. “I have a right to know where he is! He’s a liar!”
“Actually, ma’am,” the officer said, “Placing a tracking device on a vehicle you do not own and without the owner’s consent is a Class A misdemeanor, bordering on stalking.”
That’s when she cracked. She lunged for the device. “Give it to me! You can’t take my phone either!”
The Evidence
They did take her phone. And what they found was terrifying. Jessica hadn’t just tracked me. She had an app linked to the device that alerted her if I stopped in one place for more than 10 minutes. When I stopped to change the tire, the app flagged it. But because of the heavy rain and the jacking up of the car, the device had slipped and lost signal.
The notification on her phone read: Target Device Tampered/Signal Lost. That’s why she sped over. She didn’t think I was cheating; she thought I had found the tracker and was disabling it to escape her.
The Aftermath
Jessica was arrested for stalking and disorderly conduct. My boss, who witnessed the whole thing, didn’t fire me. He actually apologized and gave me a paid day off to handle the legal mess.
I broke up with Jessica from the safety of a police station. I later found out through the investigation that she had been listening to my conversations through a baby monitor app she secretly installed on my iPad, too.
I finished changing Emily’s tire that night before I went home. It was the longest, wettest night of my life, but it was worth it. If that tire hadn’t blown, I never would have found the device, and I might still be living with a woman who treated my life like a prison sentence.
