A seven-year-old girl from the Cebu City in the central Philippines got the best surprise of her life last week when a whopping 42 FoodPanda delivery riders, all in pink uniforms, lined up outside her house carrying parcels of the same order of chicken fillets of which she had ordered only one.
According to local media reports, the 7-year-old girl, along with her grandmother, at 11 a.m. (local time) last Wednesday had placed a simple order, comprising two boxes of chicken fried fillet with fries, but was shocked to see so many food delivery men outside her gate as the order was placed multiple times owing to a slow internet speed or technical glitch in the online food app.
Instead of just tapping the app once she confirmed several times thinking her order hadn't been transmitted because the internet was very slow.
The girl's parents were at work and they left her a smartphone so that she can order food online for herself and her grandmother to eat.
Neighbours come to the rescue
Dann Kayne Suarez, a neighbour, narrated the entire incident on his Facebook Live page. However, he revealed that the girl knew how to use the app and have done so in the past.
The neighbour said that some of the riders brought two or three orders to the girl's residence. The intermittent internet connection caused the glitch in the Foodpanda app, he added.
It became quite a commotion when all the riders arrived almost exactly at the same time to the narrow street. Soon, the narrow street in Barangay Mabolo saw 42 riders of Foodpanda arriving, within minutes of each other, with the same order, drawing curious glares from neighbours.
Following the overwhelming amount of riders that came delivering to her doorstep, the girl got scared and broke down into tears. This was because her parents only left her enough money for one box of chicken fillet.
Each box of chicken fillet contained rice and french fries and cost 189 Philippine pesos (USD3.93). Her 42 meals came to almost PHP 8,000.
Thankfully, her neighbours came to the rescue by buying boxes of the chicken fillet for themselves and paid directly to the delivery riders. But some of the riders still had to take a few packets back to the restaurants.
