"Today we're demonstrating bridge sabotage, and more importantly, how it leads to proper bridge building," announced the villian to his henchmen-in-training. "We're pretty sure the city's got the message on this now."
A small VW bug was driven up to the edged of the bridge, and Josh, one of his henchmen, got out.
"Now, if this bridge was built right, we should be able to remove any six random struts, and cars will still be able to drive across it safely. If not, the bridge will collapse, and the car will fall. We'll leave it to Josh here to determine which struts get removed."
Josh was handed a coin. He flipped it several times. The results were observed, and several other henchmen rappelled down the sides of the bridge and removed the appropriate struts.
The bridge creaked.
"OK. All ready, Josh?" Josh gave a thumbs up, put on a crash helmet and goggles, and got in. "Proceed at will."
There was a long wait. After a few minutes, Josh came out and said the car wouldn't start. Other henchmen came with wrenches and examined the engine. The motor was completely dead.
"OK, that was unexpected. End of demo. This happens a lot more often than you'd think. We'll try to figure out what happened here. It may be useful in the future. Thank you all, perhaps we'll try this again tomorrow, let's move on to the next training topic."
This was in response to a prompt on reddit.com r/WritingPrompts, "The Hero wasn't merely pretending to be one of the Villains henchmen, they actually applied and went through orientation. It was NOT like what they expected."
Found it. The car had a new VilliansCare(tm) smog control device designed to shut down the motor when traffic was stalled. It was misconfigured. It interpreted the wait for the struts to be removed from the bridge as stalled traffic, and it was keeping the motor off to prevent pollution because it was reading that traffic was still stalled.