A New York-based restaurant is changing the world, one pizza at a time. They made a difference for one man who visited them with an unusual order, and left the table fulfilled and happy. It was Jason’s birthday, and the eatery made his day extra special by honoring his bizarre pizza request.
Representative Image Source: Pexels | nomad ashwin
Jason, who has recently deleted his account, made a post in May 2022 entitled, “I had a crappy birthday, but my local pizza place had my back.” The post was shared by the popular Reddit community r/MadeMeSmile and currently has over 97,000 upvotes. On his special day, Jason was sad. So, while placing an order, he added a special request that said, “It’s my birthday and not even my family called me. I’m sad and I really like olives. Please put on as many black olives as you can. I want you to put on so many black olives that you start to question mine and your own sanity. As much as you can include without being fired. Thank you.”
Image source: Reddit | r/mademesmile
To his surprise, the pizzeria effectuated his request and returned his order with a pizza covered with tons of black olives. They even went above and beyond by presenting a pizza box whose inner flap was decorated with a cool cake drawing. A message of “Happy Birthday” was scrawled alongside the drawing, as well as the Spanish equivalent “Feliz cumpleaños.” The pizzeria even provided an extra container of black olives kept in the corner of the pizza box.
Image source: Reddit | r/mademesmile
People all over social media have been commending the pizzeria for their generous deed in response to the man’s heartbreaking note. u/cellophane7, who has worked in several pizzerias commented, “Getting an opportunity to cheer up a stranger was always a joy. Plus, it's fun to be a little creative with box art. I remember every single instance of people asking for weird custom stuff like this. Just wanted you to know you made their night as well.”
Image Source: Reddit | u/22Burner
Another Redditor, u/deadletterdept, extended his blessings to Jason by saying, “Yo my dude! Happy birthday! It's a long shot, but if you're in Canada, I'd like to send you a couple of bucks toward your pizza via e-transfer. I've had a bunch of lonely birthdays; I feel you.”
Among the countless pages where the post was shared was r/deliciouscompliance. Plus, the photographs of Jason’s olive-drenched pizza and instruction receipt were reposted in an Instagram post that attracted over 1 million likes.
As for Jason, Norbert’s service certainly would have made up for the absence of his family on his birthday. They made his birthday a red-letter day and his sad heart a little happy. Later, Jason told Newsweek that at first he "wasn't sure what to expect," but after the servers returned with his order, he was very much pleased. "It was very sweet and definitely made my day a little better," he said.
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Pictured: A healthy practice?
Will your current friends still be with you after seven years?
Professor shares how many years a friendship must last before it'll become lifelong
Think of your best friend. How long have you known them? Growing up, children make friends and say they’ll be best friends forever. That’s where “BFF” came from, for crying out loud. But is the concept of the lifelong friend real? If so, how many years of friendship will have to bloom before a friendship goes the distance? Well, a Dutch study may have the answer to that last question.
Sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst and his team in the Netherlands did extensive research on friendships and made some interesting findings in his surveys and studies. Mollenhorst found that over half of your friendships will “shed” within seven years. However, the relationships that go past the seven-year mark tend to last. This led to the prevailing theory that most friendships lasting more than seven years would endure throughout a person’s lifetime.
In Mollenhorst’s findings, lifelong friendships seem to come down to one thing: reciprocal effort. The primary reason so many friendships form and fade within seven-year cycles has much to do with a person’s ages and life stages. A lot of people lose touch with elementary and high school friends because so many leave home to attend college. Work friends change when someone gets promoted or finds a better job in a different state. Some friends get married and have children, reducing one-on-one time together, and thus a friendship fades. It’s easy to lose friends, but naturally harder to keep them when you’re no longer in proximity.
Some people on Reddit even wonder if lifelong friendships are actually real or just a romanticized thought nowadays. However, older commenters showed that lifelong friendship is still possible:
“I met my friend on the first day of kindergarten. Maybe not the very first day, but within the first week. We were texting each other stupid memes just yesterday. This year we’ll both celebrate our 58th birthdays.”
“My oldest friend and I met when she was just 5 and I was 9. Next-door neighbors. We're now both over 60 and still talk weekly and visit at least twice a year.”
“I’m 55. I’ve just spent a weekend with friends I met 24 and 32 years ago respectively. I’m also still in touch with my penpal in the States. I was 15 when we started writing to each other.”
“My friends (3 of them) go back to my college days in my 20’s that I still talk to a minimum of once a week. I'm in my early 60s now.”
“We ebb and flow. Sometimes many years will pass as we go through different things and phases. Nobody gets buttsore if we aren’t in touch all the time. In our 50s we don’t try and argue or be petty like we did before. But I love them. I don’t need a weekly lunch to know that. I could make a call right now if I needed something. Same with them.”
Maintaining a friendship for life is never guaranteed, but there are ways, psychotherapists say, that can make a friendship last. It’s not easy, but for a friendship to last, both participants need to make room for patience and place greater weight on their similarities than on the differences that may develop over time. Along with that, it’s helpful to be tolerant of large distances and gaps of time between visits, too. It’s not easy, and it requires both people involved to be equally invested to keep the friendship alive and from becoming stagnant.
As tough as it sounds, it is still possible. You may be a fortunate person who can name several friends you’ve kept for over seven years or over seventy years. But if you’re not, every new friendship you make has the same chance and potential of being lifelong.