So I went to help my girlfriend many years ago to buy a car at a Toyota dealership. We walked in and immediately told them we were only looking and NOT planning to buy a car that night, as we’d just happened to drive by and weren’t even sure if she wanted a new car yet or not. The guy we talked to said he understood.

We were soon to realize we had unwittingly come across the car salesman from hell.

Now in fairness, many car salespeople get a bad rap. It’s typically the finance guy who screws you in a dealership these days, by burying a bunch of stuff you didn’t really want in the 70 pages of paperwork.

But not this time.

So the first thing he does is ask us what car we are interested in and offer us a test drive. He was a younger guy, probably mid-to-late 20’s, and had a slick, fast-talking way about him.

Not sure of what to look for, my girlfriend asks me to take the wheel and give her my impressions. While out on the test-drive, he starts talking about how drunk he got the night before and moves onto how, “hot” my girlfriend is. He ask’s how long we’ve been dating. I tell him that we’re really just here to test the car and he mutters something about, “Hey, I’ll call the shot’s here.”

He proceeds to tell me I’m not driving the car fast enough. He asks if I’m scared of it. “Um, no—I just don’t want to get a ticket is all, and she’s not going to be driving that fast, either.” He insinuates I am less than manly by driving just a few miles an hour over the speed limit and then say’s, “Pull over and I’ll take us back to the lot.” I do. We still regret it.

He gets in and immediately floors the car and has us doing about 90 on suburban streets behind the dealership. “This is what this car can DO!” he yells. My girlfriend and I are yelling for him to slow down and he starts laughing. He does, and we drive back to the dealership.

By now, I’m pretty mad, and he knows it. He’s no longer even trying to win me over, and has become openly hostile towards me. He then asks for her car keys to evaluate her trade. We remind him we’re not buying that night. He tells us, “No problem, at least you’ll know what you get in return.”

Now get this—before he even asks how much she owes on the car, he asks if we’re familiar with the term, “Being upside down on your trade” means. Again, he doesn’t even know how much she owes on the car, but is already telling her she’ll owe more than its worth and likely get nothing for her trade.

We go back to the sales office and he starts asking what options we’ll want included. I again remind him that we were just looking, and that we will definitely not be buying a car that night. He responds to my GF, “Little lady, who’s buying the car tonight, you or bossy boyfriend over her? Do we even really need him here for this?” She assures him she does.

She’s now as pissed as I am. She says she wants her keys back. He tells her that he doesn’t have them, and asks why if she’s not there to buy a car, why she wasted his time. He then tells her he’s going to give her a deal so great that she won’t want to comparison shop, and if she understood more about cars, she’d see that.

Seriously, you cannot make this stuff up.

By now, the whole interaction has become hostile and we are asking to leave. I’m telling him I’m not going to let her buy a car from him, and he stops talking to me, and only speaks to her. He refuses to let us leave, and nods at another salesman who has the doors to the dealership locked (it had just closed) to keep us in.

We are seriously beginning to wonder what the hell is going on. He continues to insult me and try to awkwardly flirt with her until he says, “Let me talk to my sales manager—you’re not going to believe the deal I’m gonna get you!” and leaves the office.

We can’t believe what we’ve walked into. We both agree that we’re being held against our will.

At this point, there’s a guy washing windows who has been watching the whole thing and takes pity on us. He looks at us and asks if we want to leave. We excitedly say, “YES!!” and he goes to a drawer and pulls out her car keys. He then opens the door to the dealership and we literally run to her car. We start driving away when I realize I’ve gone the wrong way and have actually driven deeper into the lot and need to turn around.

By now, the salesman has seen what’s happening, comes out of his manager’s office and is running through the lot screaming for us to come back. I am honking the horn at him, telling him to go Bleep himself. He starts to run in front of the car but I don’t slow down and he gets out of the way. I jerk the wheel and get us onto the street and am flipping him off, honking the horn, laughing at him and telling him he's an asshole. Not sure what he was doing at that point, but he was watching it all, and he didn’t seem happy.

That incident left such a mark on me, that it would be ten years before I would so much as walk into a dealership again. I’m glad to report that my subsequent dealings went a lot better.

The irony was, about a year later, we ended up in the same evening college class at Georgia State University. He didn’t remember me, but I remembered him, and he was still every bit the jerk he was at the dealership.