Image : Disney , Photo : Yarygin ( iStock )

This story is a story about a funny ice cream cake, and we’ll get to that, but keep in mind that it’s also a story about what happens when people innocuously post things online without thinking about their potential consequences.


But first, the ice cream cake. Earlier this month, at a Dairy Queen in Macon, Georgia, a customer called in to order a 25th birthday cake themed around the Disney hit Moana. According to WMAZ, the initial order was misheard (possibly for Southern accent-related reasons), and instead, this was the end result:


The cake is great; the extremely specific decision to augment the imagery using a baked My Little Pony even more so. Rarely does a miscommunication pay off so richly. And yet, based on a follow-up by USA Today, the funny viral image might have caused some very real trouble for the decorator who put the cake together. Cassandra Walker, a mother of two, now says that she was fired on her birthday over the mishap, despite the fact that a manager reportedly oversaw her work at every step.

Walker attests that “The manager stood behind me while I pulled the images off the internet... She walked by as I decorated the cake. As I boxed the cake up, she was the one who walked it up to the front.” After the image went viral, Walker says that one of the location’s owners told her that they could no longer retain her. In a statement, the owner had initially acknowledged that “When the customer picked it up and said it was not what she ordered, we immediately apologized for the error and offered to redesign it the way she originally intended. The customer said it was fine, paid for the cake and left.” While she was re-offered her job by another manager a few days later, Walker refused on the grounds of unjust termination.

While it’s unlikely that malice was intended by those who posted the initial picture of the cake, here’s your latest reminder in a long line of them that when you throw somebody else on the internet, there’s always a risk that it’ll come back to bite them in some way. Be considerate of those around you, even if it might seem like there’s no issue present. Also, make sure you clearly request your cakes over the phone, whether you’re celebrating an intrepid Polynesian warrior or the fact that you like to get high.