It was going to be the prank to end all pranks. Sure, the day hadn’t been all bad—certain aspects of it had been pretty good—but in the end Dwight had taken a large portion of his income for no good reason except competitiveness. It didn’t even help Dunder Mifflin; Decker wasn’t paying the company more, and he’d been a consistent client for Jim. If anything, competing over clients within the company was a waste of time. And speaking of wasting time…there was nothing Jim loved more than the kind of prank that could drive Dwight insane.
And this prank definitely had that potential.
But in order to truly make the most of it, he would have to plan. Steve was in: it wasn’t that he felt the need to punish Michael, he explained, but rather that he knew whatever had happened would be crazy enough that Jim wouldn’t be able to explain it properly, and since he knew Michael, he’d believe it. A quick bargain was struck: Steve would take a day off work, with sufficient warning, on a day of Jim’s choosing; Jim would run the spotlight for Steve’s community theater production of Fiddler on the Roof, running two weekends and a few rehearsals to get up to speed on the follow spot. He hadn’t run one since college but hey, how hard could it be?
But even after that was settled, there was still planning involved. Jim needed Dwight to truly believe in this; it wasn’t enough to annoy his coworker, he needed him to buy in. He knew Dwight, in some ways probably better than he ought to, and he knew his initial reaction would be sheer, stubborn disbelief. That was the engine that drove the train of the prank, of course, but he still had to craft the rails that would guide the engine into true memorable brilliance. Letting Dwight build up steam until he exploded was fun once; letting him drive himself down the track to self-doubt (a destination he rarely visited) would be fun forever. All of which meant that he needed Dwight to get beyond that initial disbelief. He needed to figure out what would convince Dwight that Steve was Jim, and present him with that evidence, without Dwight realizing that he was being managed.
Step one: keep a diary. If there was one thing Dwight loved, it was asking questions. Question: what did Michael tell us to do yesterday? Question: where were you during lunch hour? Question: what did we do with the Hanford account files? So Steve would need to be able to answer any questions that Dwight asked. And that meant that Jim needed to do something he rarely if ever did: get organized about work. He started taking notes about meetings, about clients, about everyday events. He explained it to Dwight as an edict from Jan about documenting Michael’s behavior; he got Pam to back him up on this by calling it a prank on Dwight—which had the additional benefit of being true. He wasn’t sure when he’d be ready to spring the trap, so he made himself get in the habit of note-taking until Dwight didn’t notice it anymore, and wouldn’t consider it to be part of the preparations once the prank began.
It took weeks.
But the time was hardly wasted. He found his work, to his horror, improving—but this was not an unadulterated sorrow to him, because the increased efficiency of his work gave him more time to linger in front of reception, and also, around that, to prepare the rest of the prank’s groundwork.
He had always kept a picture of himself with his little niece and nephew on his desk: fortunately for this purpose, the kind of pose that was easy to replicate, just two heads next to each other with big smiles, and no one else in the photo. Steve also had young relatives—not a niece and nephew, but cousins, with the generations about fifteen years off—and it was a simple thing to get him to take photos with them and print out copies to replace his own pictures when the time came.
Easier still were minor issues like his phone password, computer login, and so on. Technically it was a violation of his contract to give these to Steve. But was it a violation to write them down and just happen to leave them on his coffee table while Steve was over? Probably. But honestly, he didn’t really care, and anyway, Toby was on his side.
Actually, Toby was his secret weapon. He knew from experience that pretty much everyone in the office would go along with a prank on Dwight if he paid them five dollars or less. But just going along wouldn’t be enough for this prank. He’d need someone to actively participate: someone to confirm Steve’s Jim identity at the critical moment. Usually this would be Pam, but he couldn’t for the life of him think of anything Pam could do that would convince Dwight of “Jim”’s identity. He’d just assume she was in on the prank—as, of course, she would be. No, Pam’s role had to be not knowing about the prank. Only if she assured Dwight she didn’t know of anything going on would he be inclined to believe anything she said—and anyway, Pam was game for a prank, and smart, and funny, and…where was he going with this? Oh, yeah, she’d go along without being told. But someone would need to take an active part, and there was nothing more convincing than having Toby come out of the back with a form to sign or something like that.
He had several baits to entice Toby into participating. First of all, there was the fact that this was all (at least to a certain degree) about tweaking Dwight for not having participated properly in a company-mandated training. That was a weak reason, but it got him in the door. Second, there was the offer to babysit Sasha, blank check, anytime. That was a stronger reason. And third, well, Toby loved coming up front to the main office from the annex, for any reason. At first Jim had thought it was for the pleasure of his own company—after all, when they’d had desks together, they’d bonded and talked all the time—but recently, he was beginning to suspect Toby might have more in common with him than he thought…because he spent more time up at reception than he ever did at Jim’s desk anymore.
Well, he’d have to get in line. Not that there was a line. Not that Pam had ever indicated there would or could be a line, because she stayed with her Neanderthal of a fiancé in a way that showed, well, honor, love, and loyalty in ways that Jim would normally find delightful if they weren’t directed at Roy Anderson. But given that regrettably but honestly unswerving loyalty, he wasn’t above playing on Toby’s being in a similar state to his own to further a prank or two.
The last step he almost forgot. Since the entire essence of the prank involved him not being there, he needed a way to tell what was going on. His first instinct was to simply uncover the tape on his computer’s webcam, but it occurred to him that this would both arouse Dwight’s suspicions and not give him a view of Dwight, only of Steve. Pam, however, had a USB webcam she was supposed to use to generate temporary badges for recurring visitors, like important clients or outside contractors, per Dunder Mifflin corporate policy. Now, because all visitors to the Scranton Office Park got issued their temporary badges from Hank down at the Security desk, Pam had to Jim’s knowledge never actually used this USB webcam, but the corporate handbook required that she have it, which was good enough for him. She was delighted to “incidentally” place it out for “testing” every Tuesday, which left him just the task of choosing which particular Tuesday to use for the prank.
It had to be a Tuesday Michael was out of the office, since he knew Steve and was likely, being Michael, to simply bellow his name (or a variant thereof) to the rafters as soon as he saw him, thus blowing his cover. But fortunately it was not a difficult task to find a Tuesday without Michael in the office, since he had declared it “Anti-Hump Day” and routinely scheduled every activity he could to take himself and often others out of the place, including once, memorably, a skee-ball tournament which Jim had won decisively over (out of all people) Creed. So everything was set: all that mattered was finding the right moment to spring the prank on an unsuspecting Dwight.
