The Dorothy Prank

When Dorothy first came to work with us, we weren't sure how to react. Our hours were already getting cut, and they hired this new person to make hours even scarcer. We found out later that because we hasn't been acclimating well to Cindy as an outside hire for our manager, Dorothy was a just-in-case-you-quit hire. We were told specifically not to train her, that she'd be fully under Cindy's tutelage- which was laughable because Cindy was new herself and didn't have any product knowledge and was still asking me about basic store operations. But the long and the short of it was we didn't get to know Dorothy for weeks. And so we started an elaborate prank.

How things actually stood: I was dating Taylor, Kat was dating Christian and Isaac, and Molly was single. But Molly and Christian lived in the same apartment complex, and this simple interaction resulted in weeks of plot development.

Dorothy: (Somehow under the impression Molly and Christian were dating) Aww, you guys are cute. Do you live together?
Molly: (confused) Well... Sorta.

When she relayed to us that Dorothy thought they were dating, we jumped on board. How we set it up: Molly and Christian were dating, Molly was becoming increasingly jealous of Kat, who Christian was sleeping with on the side, and since I'd already been gushing about Taylor we wrote me in as a one-night stand with him months ago, who he was trying to hook back up with.

Every shift we had with Dorothy someone would drop a remark. When Kat told me in front of Dorothy that Christian had helped her pick new glasses frames, I asked if Molly was jealous. She said a little, that they weren't able to spend a lot of time together. We tried to make each statement innocuous enough that they weren't direct comments. We never said who was dating who. When Dorothy asked me I shrugged and said it was complicated.

Christian and I practiced flirting, which we were ridiculously bad at. He'd wink at me and I'd burst out laughing, or I'd give him a come-hither look and he'd snort.

But the best part about our prank was when we forgot about it. We'd laid all this ground work and then simultaneously we all forgot about it. Months later, Molly remembered, and asked Dorothy if she'd picked up on our back story. Apparently she'd gone home to her roommate and said, "I think all my coworkers have sex with each other." It had been just as confusing to her when we stopped as when we'd started and instead of picking up on all the nuances of our carefully planned backstop she just assumed we were sex fiends.