After bragging that he could fool his employer (the town of Islip on Long Island) into believing his company vehicle was parked at his house by removing the GPS inside, thus freeing him to use the company car for his personal use, Emery Dicey was caught doing just that when his humorless Big Brother employers stuck a second GPS on the underside of the car, tracking it one day and sending a goon out to spot Dicey as he apparently slept in the vehicle’s back seat in a hotel parking lot.

Although an employee of the town for 30 years, Dicey apparently chose the wrong job if he wanted an employer who had a human attitude and could see things in perspective. When your bosses are so paranoid and controlling that they start spying on you and planting GPS devices to monitor your comings and goings, it’s time to look for a new job.

Some will say that the employers were in the right because Dicey was misusing company property. To those people we say, relax and get a life. When someone has given you thirty years of their life, they’re entitled to a little personal rebellion, especially if it’s of a nature that hurts no one and costs next to nothing for the company. If that realization doesn’t come naturally to you, you have no business being in charge of anyone or anything. One imagines the managers gathered around a computer screen in a small airport office, flush with the excitement of their clever 007 trickery and immediately taking on a misguided, self-important sense of piety and duty.

But to Emery Dicey, we say: next time, try not to go bragging about your misdeeds. What you did wasn’t that bad, and the way you were caught is creepy to the nth degree, but it’s awful hard to blame anyone but you.

(We tried to get more information about Long Island MacArthur Airport for this story, but their official website doesn’t cover much and is still dated 2007, which didn’t fill us with confidence anyway.)

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