Getting food delivered is one of life's little joys. Getting food delivered when you didn't order anything, however, offers a bit of a conundrum.
In the case of Becca Barnoski, who found a box of doughnuts left at her door, she waited for two hours before doing the inevitable: devouring the box.
However, when she found a note from her neighbor on her door later that day, she told Newsweek: "My heart dropped."
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Business owner and health care worker Barnoski, who recently had a baby girl, shared a video of the mix-up to her TikTok account @beccabarnoski on August 3, which has gone viral with more than 4.3 million views and over 367,000 likes in a matter of days.
In the slideshow clip, she says the box of doughnuts had been sitting outside her door for two hours, and messaged a friend asking, "morally can it be mine"?
After her friend said it's "legally yours now," Barnoski tucked in, sharing snaps of the doughnuts disappearing one by one.
But, four hours later, she returned home to find a Post-it note stuck to her door with a neighbor's name and number, and the words: "Help! Missing Duck Donuts!"
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"I was immediately embarrassed and scrambling to fix my mistake," Barnoski told Newsweek. "I knew I had to be honest."
She immediately messaged her neighbor apologizing and explaining what happened, and said he was "so nice and refused reimbursement or anything."
In his message to her, the neighbor said the doughnuts were a surprise gift and they weren't expecting them, explaining why they were left at her door for so long.
He pleaded with her not to worry, but Barnoski felt guilty and later gave the neighbors a handwritten apology note, complete with a gift card to a local restaurant, saying that they "enjoy a dinner on us".
Barnoski wrote in the caption to her video: "Do you think we're good? Am I the worst? Yes. Does this make up for it? Maybe?"
Barnoski told Newsweek that, since having her baby in March, "people have been sending things nonstop;" while the name on the doughnuts wasn't her own, "I thought maybe it was the delivery person's name on the receipt."
"So I assumed, OK, maybe they're for me, because I go back to work from maternity leave on Monday. So I ate them."
TikTok users flocked to the video, leaving over 1,800 comments since the clip was uploaded, with one writing: "You better than me bc [because] I would have thrown away the Post-it and this video wouldn't exist."
Another pointed out the restaurant gift card would have cost far more than the doughnuts, but Barnoski said it was "the price I pay" for eating the neighbor's treats.
And a third posted: "Here to say I would've eaten the doughnuts after 2 hours too."
Barnoski, who also works in digital marketing, said she never expected her video to get so many views.
She added that her neighbor was actually a little relieved she ate the doughnuts as he is trying to avoid sweet things.
But the initial mix-up led to something sweet in the end, as Barnoski said: "My neighbor and I are great, and we plan to do a double date with our spouses."
While Barnoski and her spouse have got to know their neighbors through the doughnut saga, a 2018 survey from Pew Research Center found that 56 percent of Americans say they only know some of their neighbors.
Only 26 percent of those surveyed were confident they knew most of them. And among younger Americans, under the age of 30, 23 percent don't know any of their neighbors.
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