A waste of perfectly good ice cream?

There’s a new craze going around involving ice cream, fast food drive-thrus, and your bare hands. Sounds appealing, right?

Here’s the icy-cold twist: When grabbing the ice cream cone from the drive-thru attendant, you grab the top instead of the cone—and you capture the resulting awkward moment between you and the fast-food server on video.

Alki Stevens of Melbourne, Australia, says he started cone-ing about five years ago, but Stevens’ latest cone-ing video was created for Australian radio station NOVA’s viral video competition “Unhatched”.

The food blog Eater.com speculates that cone-ing will be the official meme of the summer. If it is, I don’t want to live on this planet any more.  It’s a waste of perfectly good ice cream and I imagine it gets your hands and steering wheel all sticky.

The radio station’s judges seemed to agree. Yet they proved badly out of touch with what YouTube’s community loves—namely, sticky messes. Stevens didn’t win the contest, despite the media coverage and copycat videos from around the world. Instead, Chris Leben claimed the $10,000 prize for his “iPhone Love” video, with just over 13,000 views. Stevens first cone-ing video has more than 1 million views and was mentioned on NPR, ABC News, and dozens of blogs. And the meme database KnowYourMeme.com is considering cone-ing for induction into their site.

Tony Gautier of the website BunchofJerks.com, has taken cone-ing to a new level by smashing the ice cream to one’s face. In the video, you can see the attendant doesn’t bat an eye while discussing change for “Bryan G’s” order.

When asked why he’d come up with rubbing ice cream on the face, Gautier explained in an email exchange:

“Well, all anyone was really doing was just repeating the same thing the original guy did. We decided the only thing missing from the original video was something that would make it more outrageous and random. I mean if you were working a drive-thru, and someone grabbed the ice cream cone from the wrong side, you would be kinda taken off guard by it all, but if they were to then smash that ice cream into their own face, it would cause total confusion.”

Indeed.

There’s a happy ending, of sorts, to this sticky situation, “Bryan G” told the Daily Dot, when asked about the aftermath.

“Steering wheel not so much, but my face was sticky the rest of the day. I fell asleep on the couch and had a dream that the pink Power Ranger was making out with me. It was the greatest dream ever. Then I woke up and it was my dog licking my face.”

McDonald’s press representatives did not respond to requests for comment.

We thought about interviewing “Bryan G’s” dog, but even viral-video reporters have limits.