The Strawberry Ice Breaker Story
A college story for friends and family (mostly my kids, when they're old enough to get it)
Back when I was young and still dating your mother, we took a school-sponsored trip to a little cabin for an “Unplugged Weekend”, where everyone put down their phones and actually hung out with the people around them, instead of sitting in the same room as them and just looking at their phones. I, having a flip phone, didn’t have this problem and already spent a lot of time looking at and talking to the people around me, and found it very amusing that sometimes they would stop in the middle of their own sentences to check their phone, apparently finding their own conversation too boring to be involved in. You could also easily spot when someone was “low-status” because as soon as they started responding to what was being said, everyone else would pull out their phone before their first sentence was done, and it would end up with just me listening while everyone else went off to their own worlds.
Your mother remembers this trip as the first time she really saw stars, having grown up in New York and never being much of an outdoors person. It was during a meteor shower of some sort (Perseids? Leonids maybe? Something during winter-ish, like February), so we all went out onto a hill in the middle of the night, freezing to death and watching hundreds of shooting stars fly across the sky. It was the first time your mother discovered you can really see the milky way, and that there are SO MANY stars, and she wished for us to be together forever on all the shooting stars.
I remember it for the Strawberry Ice Breaker.
Ice Breakers are little get-to-know-you activities, that help get people learn each other names and not feel so shy and alone. The simplest one is when you all say your name, how old you are, and one thing that’s special about you. That way if you find yourself standing near them, you can sort of remember their name, and you have something that you can start talking about without feeling lost. You’ll think “I know this person! We can talk!” instead of “This is a stranger, I think I’ll leave them alone.” We did them a lot in college, because you’re often with a new bunch of people and the organizers want people to make fiends and have fun.
The Ice Breaker we were doing this time was that we all stand in a big circle, and we say our names, our major and year, and then what our favorite flavor of ice cream is.
Everyone who went around and did it did the same thing:
Ummmm. Hi. My name is John…? And I’m a sophomore majoring in Communications. And, let’s see… If I had to say my favorite Ice Cream … Hmm… I guess I would have to pick Chocolate.
There were probably 30 or 40 people, so this was taking kind of a while. I felt like this was a giant waste of time. When it was going to be my turn, I was going to do it right and get everything nicely streamlined, so we can go quickly.
itsnotmyfault.
Junior, Mechanical Engineering.
Strawberry.
Simple. Clean. Direct. No extraneous words. Perfect.
It took a second for my words to register for everyone. A second of pure silence while everyone simultaneously marveled at how cleanly the information slotted directly into the mental cubbies that they hadn’t even realized were built within their mind’s filing drawers. You could almost hear the papers being carefully placed within the corresponding folders, then the metal drawer’s being slammed shut, before the machinery started processing it.
Engineer, huh. That tracks. Very efficient. Like a robot.
Strawberry, huh. Wait a minute.
After that brief silence, a few laughs spurted out as the listeners’ minds choked on the sudden mismatch between their mental image of a stoic, robotic engineer delivering information in a bulleted list, and the cloyingly sweet, bright pink flavor (so-far yet unmentioned by anyone else).
Once the first few laughs burst out, everyone else let their chuckles slip.
Then, with most having never met me, there was a mad scramble to try to suppress their laughs. They didn’t really know why it was so funny that a robot would like strawberry ice cream, but they could definitely sense that there was something kind of potentially offense about finding it laugh-out-loud funny. I flashed them a smile to let them know it was alright. I hadn’t said it to be funny, but now that it had come out, I did find it funny. It was funny, and it’s ok to laugh at funny things.
I think I’ve really nailed a few different public speaking events in my life. This was one of them, with another being my senior speech for the Cross Country team in highschool (Rock, paper, scissors). Some of the sort of medium ones were the sock story in middle school, and my wedding vows (which I sort of rushed the delivery on). Maybe next time I’ll tell you one of those stories.