(Submitted by reader Matthew McGrath)
Earlier this evening I had a powerful craving for some pizza.
It was 8pm and rainy on a Thursday evening, so I thought I’d order a pizza from a restaurant down the street. After ordering using their fancy website, I got a call several minutes later from a rather confused employee of the restaurant. She asked me why I decided to place two separate orders: one delivery and one pick-up. I replied that no, in fact I just ordered the one pizza to be delivered and nothing else.
Thinking it was a computer error, she confirmed both orders and realized that the following had occurred: two separate, unrelated people named Matthew McGrath decided to order a pizza. Both chose the same restaurant, and both chose not to call but to use the online order system. Both submitted their orders at exactly the same time and both live within a 5 mile radius of the restaurant in question. Weird.
Below are the extended notes provided by Barbara Drescher for use in Skepticality Episode 196. Take a look and leave your comments below.
This story falls into the category of “difficult to calculate” due to a lack of information, but again, it brings up an interesting human behavior. The fact that someone with his name lives within a 5-mile radius is not very surprising. When I was a child and we lived in an area with a fairly low population density, there were 2 people within that distance with my father’s name; one even shared his middle name and was retired from the U.S. Navy (my father was active duty at the time). The odds of ordering pizza at the same time is another question. The information we would need in order to estimate, even generally, the odds of this include:
- The location, population, and number of pizza places available in the area which deliver.
- The year, which we would need in order to determine how common the author’s name.
- The proportion of pizza orders which were made online at that time. How often the author orders pizza.
- Some information about pizza delivery trends – do more people order pizza when it’s raining? What are the peak ordering times? The more orders a place receives, the more likely this is to happen.
What I find interesting is how many “same name” stories we encounter. Surely there are interesting coincidences every day, but people are more likely to notice events that involve something as personal as their own name. Most of us have lived with our first names our entire lives. We write it, say it, and hear it more often than any other name in the universe. So even though our names are not unique to us, they sometimes feel as if they are and they are extremely personal.
This is one weird story. McGrath isn’t that common of a name I would think. Wonder what the demographics of his area would say about his name. I know that there is only one more Susan Gerbic in the world, she is a distant cousin whom I have never met but we still get some confusion with frequent flyer miles and the like. I suppose that some day I will have an odd story to share where the other Susan and I will have an odd happening.
Please share this with everyone. I worked in several pizza places for over 15 years, and this is more common than you think. This is what probably really happened. The store’s computer and caller ID are linked so that the customer ordering can have their info displayed to the associate taking the call. If a computer order comes in and someone needed to look at it, they pull it up manually. When you have untrained minimum wage employees that do not know the system, they can get confused. If I pulled up an internet order to look at it, and did not clear the screen, another employee may walk up, pick up the phone and assume the info on the screen was auto populated by the caller ID. They would then continue to take the order under the wrong name and continue as normal. The end result is 2 orders under the same name. One correct from the internet as a delivery, and one carryout under the wrong name because the employee simply assumed, was in a rush, and failed to verify the name back to the customer. Another employee probably called back to fix the error and get the right name, but just happened to call the wrong customer back first. Again, very common and more likely than the odds based on name distribution would predict. I have seen similar things happen at Pizza Hut, Dominos, and Papa Johns. I would say it happens about once for every 30 to 50K in sales, and more often in busier stores.