The Sting

The Preparation: Nate and I had been planning our capstone prank for weeks. The prank war between our apartment and 316 has been raging since the primordial soup of this semester and we wanted to end it in style. What started as a simple light bulb heist eventually evolved into stealing everything from apartment 316, and this is how it happened.

One night while we were brainstorming on how to get into their apartment and steal their light bulbs we hit on the fake maintenance worker idea. What if, we speculated, we got someone to dress up as a maintenance worker and go into apartment 316 under the pretense that he was there to fix their blinds, and while he was in there he secretly opened the sliding glass door so that we could get in later while no one was home? It sounded like a plausible scenario, and it would make stealing light bulbs a cinch.

As we thought about how cool this fake maintenance worker idea was, we figured, why stop at light bulbs? We could steal everything from their apartment. Missing light bulbs are a minor inconvenience. Missing apartments are the stuff that legendary pranks are made of.

Psychological Warfare: In order to maximize the odds of our maintenance man being believed to be genuine, we had to lay a little groundwork. Whenever maintenance notifies any apartment that they're coming over, all they do is tape a little piece of paper to everyone's door, telling them the hours that they'll be coming over and hat exactly they're going to check. So we made some of those, and put them on every door on the building. I stayed up till 3:30 to make sure that no one caught me. So far so good.

The Infiltration: I figured the best person to pose as a maintenance worker was Trevor. Nate and I went to the DI and bought a plaid Dickies shirt, a navy blue jacket, and a Utah Jazz hat. Jared had a tool belt that he let us use, and we hid an audio recording device in it so we could see how well he did once he was done.

We met Trevor out in the Sparks parking lot and waited in his car while he did his thing. Once he got back we listened to the recording, and from what we heard it was clear that they at no point suspected him at all. He said the sliding glass window had been unlocked and all we could do was wait and hope that they didn't lock it before they went to bed. Even if they did though, we had still succeeded in getting a complete fake into somebody's house, and we felt pretty awesome about that.

D-Day (Domination Day): Sitting through sacrament meeting on this particular Sunday took every ounce of self control and discipline that I had built up over the years of going to church. I couldn't think about anything spiritual and I could barely breathe. I just kept tapping my foot and crossing and uncrossing my arms while I glanced at the clock. Nate and I counted our FHE sisters who were at church. 4. This was disheartening. We immediately started concocting back up plans, like setting up a home teaching appointment for late Saturday night so we could try again the following Sunday.

Diana wanted us all to come to church because she was doing her own prank. She told us that her and Nate were going to pretend to be engaged and that she wanted us all at church so we could support her prank. We all said we'd come, because we didn't realize that we were being played. But due to a completely random and unplanned chain of events, this ended up saving us in the end. It went like this:

David was sick, so he stayed home from church. As Nate and I were leaving, we debated about locking the door behind us. We ultimately decided that, since David was home, we would leave the door open.

Once Diana found out that we were leaving after sacrament meeting, she left so she could prank us while we were away. David heard someone knocking at the door while he was sitting in the living room in his underwear. After debating about whether or not to get dressed and answer the door or to ignore it, he got up at went to his room to put on some clothes. Once he came back outside, he saw Diana, Mallory, and Becca in our living room putting up posters of Justin Bieber and other celebrities who haven't annoyed me enough yet to the point where I've learned their name. David asked them what they were doing, and they said that they were doing a prank. David told them that he would let them do it if they let us do a prank on apartment 316 (Becca lives in 316 and was home sick, and was helping them with their prank). They agreed. David texted us this so we left after sacrament, confident that our prank was going to succeed.

There were four of us moving the furniture but it still ended up taking almost the full two hours that we had given ourselves. Moving the couches and the tables was the hard part. Halfway through our heist we realized that they had a lot of stuff in their living room, so we started moving some of the smaller stuff like potatoes and pens to the back of the room where our FHE sisters wouldn't see them. We set up a hidden camera on the refrigerator to get their reaction for when they came in and gave another camera to the person dressed as a mannequin so that they could follow the girls to our apartment and get their reaction when they saw that our apartment was identical to theirs.

The Money Shot: I had to wait for about twenty minutes dressed as a mannequin before the girls started to get home. The hardest thing I had to do was to not laugh as I watched their reactions through the sliding glass door. They were floored, and asked me where there stuff was (our mannequin disguise was less than perfect, and they figured out that I was a real person). I told them that it was in their apartment so they went to go get it and I followed with the camera. They opened the door to our apartment and Nate was there with another camera, with David taking pictures. Like we've always said, domination without documentation is worthless, and we have enough footage now to make a compelling video. It's great too, since they can never convincingly admit that they didn't like the prank, since we have a video of them saying that it was awesome. We moved all the stuff back and went down as legends.