Someone Cathy is close to is in the hospital with a shattered femur, which sounds extremely unpleasant. To cheer this person up, cathy sent some flowers through FTD. The flowers are pretty enough, but Cathy doesn’t think they’re what she ordered.

Here’s what she thought she had ordered, next to what showed up at the hospital:

Let’s look on the bright side, at least: the popularity of mobile phone photography means that you can snap a picture of a flower arrangement to confirm to the sender that you received it. If it’s very different from what was sent, the sender can go back to the florist, armed with the photo, and complain. We couldn’t do that twenty years ago: heck, I left undeveloped film on my camera for years at a time back then.

Back to Cathy’s FTD order, though. Florists do reserve the right to substitute in some flowers for others, but if Cathy had her heart set on white daisies, there aren’t any in this arrangement. The bright pink mums are there and are plentiful, but not open yet, which is a common reason why people complain to us about flowers. It’s better to receive blooms that aren’t open yet than to receive closed and dead ones.

When she complained, the mega-flower-aggregator had some homework for the recipient. “[FTD] needed to know the number of stems of each type of flower or else
there was nothing that they could do,” Cathy wrote to Consumerist. “I was not about to ask someone in the hospital with a shattered femur to go count the stems in the basket of flowers that I had sent her.”

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