By their late thirties, most adults have done something that’s at least sort of interesting with their lives. Even something as basic as having a baby niece or a whitewater rafting hobby. Hell, even just a large collection of rare paper clips. Something, anything, that they can use as an icebreaker at work.
Not Greg Heffernon. This pathetic 38-year-old finance manager at AvocadoPrism Software apparently has nothing going for him. For 23 consecutive office icebreaker games across the eight companies he’s worked, he’s turned to a single “fun fact.” He hosted a radio show called “Spiky Biscuit Riot” for two years in college. Oh cool, we guess.
Worse, the aging dork continues to believe his colleagues consider Spiky Biscuit Riot, named after a drunken inside joke with his freshman roommate, to be genuinely impressive. In reality, the show, broadcast from a damp empty basement in the student union building, averaged 1.5 on-campus listeners, plus his mom on the rare occasion the primitive webcasting equipment wasn’t broken.
“I just played whatever I wanted for two hours,” Heffernon now tells each round of cringing coworkers. Sure, Greg. If by “playing whatever” you mean “generic heavy-rotation tracks and then legally mandated public service announcements about electrical safety and pediatric dental decay every half hour.”
“Yeah, I had to load the CDs and everything. It was pretty hardcore,” the nearly-40-year-old predictably continues his pitiful anecdote. “I bet I can even still do the call letters and whole station ID in my ‘radio voice’ for you. Hold on a second.”
“Can we anonymously drop a rescue dog on Greg’s porch or something so he can have a real interest?” said fellow finance manager Sam DeVito. “Actually, no. He’d probably make the poor dog listen to the old tapes of him doing the show, which would definitely be animal abuse. I’m going to just send him a model airplane kit.”