Ice breaker suggestions

[blueyes]

This is one of those emails that always comes across your desk on a Monday...

My office manager has put me and a guy from our Cincinnati office in charge of coming up with ice breakers for our joint, face-to-face office meeting (Pittsburgh, meet Cincinnati - Cincinnati, this is Pittsburgh.) In an attempt to prevent super-lame ice breakers (which, as a rule, are lame - my only hope is to weed out the super-lame ones)...does anyone have any ice breaker ideas? I have until Friday (3/4) to come up with them.

Some things to consider:
1. Mixed gender meeting - so nothing too offensive (someone already suggested strip introductions - every time you introduce yourself to someone new, you take off an article of clothing. Yes, the guys I work with are a riot.)
2. Older age group - junior staff are in mid-20's to early 30's, but the majority of those present are 45+. More than moderately physical ice breakers will be met with glares and groans. Remember, they like their comfy leather chairs.
3. No one wants to be at this meeting. No one. We'd all like to pretend this meeting isn't happening. But...the less humiliating, the better.

[Desiderata]

the only one that comes to mind was about names
"How did you get your name, did you choose it, a nickname, family name"? etc... yah, not great, but I've been with worse, just an idea

[mishl982]

Some games we've done in school and my sorority:
- Pairs: Think of things that go together: salt and pepper, Frick and Frack, pen and paper, donnie and marie, etc. Put each name on a index card, and when people come in, stick it on their back. They are responsibile to guess who (or what) they are and to find their match. Like if I find out that the word "Salt" is on my back, I need to find the person who has "Pepper" on their back.
- Have everyone write an interesting fact about them on an index card, mix them up, hand them out, and each person has to find the person who has that factoid.

That's all I can think of for now :)

[LakeJay]

Freshman year in college, they had us randomly pair up with people and then we had to learn certain things about the other person ie. name, hometown, favorite food, weird/special thing about them. Then each person had to get up and inform everyone what they learned about other person.

Another time in this class I took for work, they had us list 3 things and one of them was true the other two were false. You introduced yourself and then read off your list and people would guess which one was true.

Are they cheesy? YES. But sometimes people just gotta suck it up sometimes.