Student Haunted by Memory of Sarcastic Personal Introduction Taken Literally

by Mimi Evans

USC — At exactly 11:43 AM on Monday, August 22nd, freshman Heather Lian made the most embarrassing mistake of her life. Failing to follow the time-honored tradition of keeping Icebreaker responses as short and superficial as possible, Lian chose instead to display her sardonic personality when answering the question “What is your dream date?”

She responded, “June 4th, because it’s my birthday,” and accompanied it with a vocal inflection usually associated with comments of a sarcastic nature. However, the comment was taken at face-value by her classmates, who were too concerned with rehearsing their own responses to bother listening.

The answer was met with complete silence. Lian was painfully aware that her peers would remember this moment vividly, and use it to question her general intelligence in any future social interaction.

She expects to replay the incident in her head every three minutes for the rest of her life. This did indeed happen, until August 25th at 2:46pm, when her Writing 150 professor corrected her pronunciation of the word “epitome.”