Pet Peeve #64: When Something You Order Is Much Smaller Than What You Envisioned

Have you ever ordered something in a restaurant or online, only to discover that the thing you ordered was comically small compared to what you envisioned?

This happened to me twice recently.

The first time was at a local restaurant I was trying for the first time. Their brunch had received a rave review, and the menu featured a twist on the traditional Eggs Benedict: Instead of ham, it featured pork belly, one of my indulgences.

As I dug into it, I didn’t realize at first that it was lacking on the pork belly. Really, it wasn’t until I peeled the egg off the second half that I saw the pitifully small bit of pork belly included the English muffin.

The photo actually makes it look much bigger than it actually was, but I assure you, it was exactly one bite of pork belly:

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The second instance came a few days later when I received a birthday present for my goddaughter. Her birthday was a few days ago, and at Thanksgiving I had asked what she wanted. She replied, “A cake!”

I figured she would have a real cake for her birthday, so I’d get her a plastic toy cake. Based on what I ordered, I truly expected something that was about the size of a small wedding cake.

Much to my surprise, the cake was tiny. So tiny that I didn’t even see it in the Amazon box when I first opened it. Here’s the box next to a standard reference cat:

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I’m sure there are far better examples than these. What’s your story of something you ordered that ended up being comically smaller than you envisioned?

7 thoughts on “Pet Peeve #64: When Something You Order Is Much Smaller Than What You Envisioned”

  1. Last Christmas I had something very similar happen when ordering a present for one of my nieces. She had asked for a microscope for her American Girl doll on her Christmas list, so I ordered it online.

    When it arrived, I was in for quite a shock at just how small it was– the box was a little smaller than a coffee cup and the toy microscope itself was about the size of an acorn. Luckily, the story has a happy ending, as she loved it and the toy was exactly how she imagined it would be.

    Reply
    • That’s so tiny! I’m glad there was a happy ending, though. My goddaughter seemed to really like the cake–she didn’t notice that it was small, and her mom was happy that it wasn’t giant. 🙂

      Reply
  2. It happened with the all day breakfast I had at a coffee shop near my FLGS recently, actually. Very small for what they describe as a full english breakfast, and with neither fried tomato nor black pudding (Granted, I never expect black pudding, it’s just an added bonus when somewhere actually does them). Their hot chocolate is too creamy for my tastes, too, but they do sell a good dandelion and burdock brand so I still might pop in there for a cold drink when the weather gets warmer again, just… Not into there for a meal or a hot drink, presumably the various decent food pubs in the area (including the one that they use for their open game nights) will continue to be my mainstay when eating in that area, while… For hot drinks I guess it’s still the Waterstones cafe in the area for me.

    With board games boxes that are smaller than I imagine are much better than boxes larger than I imagine, because I have to store the things. Doesn’t always mean it’s going to take a small amount of table space, mind, and even large box sizes can be tricky to get everything back into [Caverna is an excellent example of this]… At least, until expansions start coming out, where an oversized box or the right size of box if you use the insert that comes with the game but oversized in the abstract can save space in the long run due to being able to fit in all the expansions.

    Reply
    • Stephen: The English breakfast is still such a foreign concept to me. 🙂 And this is coming from someone who ate rice for breakfast every day for a solid year while in Japan!

      Reply
  3. After hiking 5 miles, a group of us went to Brunch. I ordered Eggs Benedict. I expected and English Muffin, eggs, ham and sauce. What I got was eggs, ham and sauce. The waiter
    seemed perplex when I asked about the English Muffin and the kitchen did not have any muffins or toast.

    Reply

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