A man who wanted a slice of pizza with a seemingly simple special request got a lot more than he bargained for.
On June 15, Redditor u/Spacemancleo, whose real name is Dillan, posted a story in the r/mildlyinfuriating subreddit that quickly leapt to the front page of Reddit. In it, he wrote about how his fahter "ordered a Hawaiian pizza with pineapple on the side" ... and you’ll never guess what arrived.
“Technically correct, I suppose,” wrote Dillan in a post that has been upvoted more than 18,000 times.
Instead of the dictionary definition of “on the side,” meaning “in addition to the main portion of something,” aka separate from the slice, one imaginative pizza shop worker neatly arranged the tropical fruit on the literal sides of the slice.
Reaction to uniquely topped pizza slice ranges from laughter to confusion, with more than 1,500 Redditors commenting to express their thoughts.
“Pizza trolled,” commented one person.
“Exactly what a Dad would serve you if you asked for pineapple on the side,” wrote another.
“Technically correct is the best kind of correct,” someone else commented, to which another jokester replied, “Except when its time to take out the dog.”
Some commenters debated what could have been done to make the pizza order clearer.
“Don’t be mad at the store for doing what they are told be mad at the dad for not clarifying,” wrote one Redditor, defending the honor of the pizzeria worker.
“I’m really excited for the next time you order food and ask for something on the side. Can you take and post a picture of the staff member’s face when you go in great detail clarifying ‘on the side,’” another user replied to the above comment.
“‘Hi, can I please get a Hawaiian pizza? But can you please put the pineapple in a container instead of on the pizza?’” added a third.
“I feel like this is a good ‘mildly infuriating’ because most posts are completely infuriating,” someone else astutely pointed out.
While Dillan's dad Jeff was completely befuddled by the slice of pizza, he was even more shocked by the fact that it went viral.
“I have ordered Hawaiian pizza that way for a long time, pineapple on the side. I’m just not a big cooked fruit person,” Jeff tells TODAY.com, adding that he made it home before he opened his box up and realized that there was something wrong (or perhaps right?) with his pizza. “It took me a little bit as I was looking at it before I realized actually what they might have been thinking and that seemed funny to me.”
Jeff got a kick out of the mishap and texted the now-viral image to his kids. Dillan, who ended up sharing the image online, adds that this particular pizza place, which is in the Albuquerque, New Mexico area, specializes in customizable slices.
“What they do is they have cheese pizza ready to go and when you tell them what kind of pizza you want, they warm up the toppings and put it onto the slice of cheese pizza,” Dillan tells TODAY.com, adding that his dad did, in fact, eat the slice, despite what many of the comments theorized. “My dad just took a photo and sent it to my sister and I for a laugh and he moved on with his day.”
As for Dillan, he knew it was funny (hence why he posted it) but “had no idea it would inspire such a huge reaction online,” he says, adding that he couldn’t keep up with the thousands of comments. “It was certainly a surprise to my father who hadn’t thought much more of it after he had sent it to us.”
And since his son was the one that posted it, Jeff couldn't see everything that was going on. “He would update me, ‘Hey, now I’m getting all these comments and I can’t keep up’ and ‘There’s this many views,’” says Jeff. “I’m like, ‘Wow, that is just weird to me,’ because I’ve never been in a situation where something related to me at all has gone viral.”
Dillan, who says he doesn’t even like his pies Hawaiian-style, notes that his whole family is getting a chuckle out of the internet turning his dad's funny text into a heated online debate.
“I think it is hilarious that so many people ended up caring so much about my dad’s slice of pizza,” he says.
