Sometimes the fruits of one’s labor are literally fruits, in fact, for much of human history that has been the case. Agriculture is hard work, requiring patience, knowledge, and a decent bit of manual labor. Of course, the result is wonderful, fresh produce. Who could resist?
Well, one farmer learned that a neighboring woman could not resist and had been stealing her plums year after year and decided to share the tale with the internet. After catching her in the act, the thieving Karen had the audacity to yell at her and call her selfish. Readers had a field day mocking this entitled neighbor and sharing their own stories of people who really thought too much of themselves.
Some people’s entitlement is so developed that they will literally steal and trespass
Image credits: Robin Ellis (not the actual photo)
One farmer ended up being yelled at by a neighboring woman who would steal her plums
Image credits: Zen Chung (not the actual photo)
Image source: LaFilleDuMoulinier
Theft of fruit is a pretty classic introduction to many tales
Media and life experiences are filled with tales of people happily stealing others’ produce. One of the early chapters in “The Fellowship of the Ring” focuses on some of the characters in the middle of stealing from a local farmer. Many rural or small-town children found ways to sneak into a neighbor’s yard to grab some apples or other items. Theft is nothing new, in fact, the oldest set of recorded laws on the planet, the very cool-sounding Code of Hammurabi, has multiple sections regarding various forms of theft and the punishments for it. Generally, if caught, one could expect some form of death. However, just the fact that these laws and punishments were needed is a pretty clear indicator that people have been stealing as long as we have had stuff. The advantage of stealing food is that you can literally eat the evidence.
Of course, in OP’s story, the issue is less theft than the Karen neighbor calling OP selfish for harvesting her own fruit. Knowing you are a thief is one thing, but constructing some sort of bizarre reality where another person’s trees and the fruit from it belongs to you is mind-boggling for most of us. However, as experience shows, this sort of person is surprisingly common, so much so that one can find hundreds, if not thousands of such tales online just by searching for some combination of the words “Karen,” “story,” and “entitled.”
Some people’s entitlement would be comical if it wasn’t so annoying
Now, some variant of “Karen” has existed for at least a few decades, taking on various names and forms. The “Soccer mom” was one example of a specific persona people applied to quickly describe a certain sort of unpleasant person while, “Barbecue Becky”, “Cornerstore Caroline”, and “Permit Patty,” have also been put forth. However, none have had the ease of use or the long-lasting ability of just calling a person a “Karen.” Now, all of these aforementioned names and the “antagonist” of OP’s story are women, however, it’s important to note that in this day and age, “Karen” can just as easily be applied to a man, for example, Elon Musk being called a “space Karen” for some public statements he has made.
In general, what this woman and many of the world’s Karens have in common is a deep-seated and bewildering entitlement. When faced with the reality that the entire universe does not revolve around them, the response, as visible in this story, is to shoot the messenger. The “Karen” yells at OP, calls her selfish and no doubt made a somewhat ridiculous scene. This is a poor decision, as the plums were never her property in the first place, OP telling her this was just communicating something that had evidently been true for years.
Imagine the audacity to climb over a fence, the clearest demarcation of territory once a year to take plums from another yard. While the specifics are unclear, it’s quite likely that most of the residents of this rural French area have a pretty good idea of where one piece of territory ends and another begins. No doubt the real crime, in “Karen’s” mind, was not her theft, but simply being caught. As many of the comments below indicate, there is an unfortunate abundance of entitlement among certain people, a cause of suffering for the rest of us.
OP shared some more details with the incredulous readers
Others gave their own examples of Karens and their antics
First - funny thing, here in the USA...Idaho to be exact (at least where I live) it's illegal to even take overhanging fruit. If my apples fall onto your property, those are now yours. However, if you reach up and grab one, that is theft. The tree and its contents belong to whomever owns the property the trunk resides on.
That's interesting because in most places it a branch overhands your fence you can legally cut it down (at the fence line) and dispose of it or literally throw it back in the neighbours yard. So could you cut the branch off then pick up the fruit off the ground?
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I don't care if my neighbours take some of my lemongrass plant for their curries etc. But some of them are just maniacs that rip big bunches. Also my next door one is a real piece of work. The whole family almost. The daughter in law likes to sweep their garden clean and throw the rubbish on my side of the garden! The old lady herself broke my avocado tree branch that didn't even go over to her side of the fence. Her excuse was the ants would climb over(and jump? They couldn't climb over the wall? The worst was the son who literally revvs his cars(plural X 3) at all times of the day, for 5-30 minutes one after another. Comes home late at night drunk, throws rubbish onto my side of the curb. beer cans & cigarette packs. The idiot literally parks 1/3 of my gateway sometimes. They have 4 cars for a terrace house! I told the father not to park in front of my house and showed documentation of their encroachment and littering over the years. My patience ran thin one fine day.
My local police FB asked me to take evidence and I did. He was revving his car at 8pm and we couldn't watch tv or hear. I made a show of recording with HP. He shouted at me holding a small stick for recording exclaming he had 36 cases and was not afraid, kicked in my gate and snatch my phone demanding I delete the video. I turned around and the fidiot was still demanding i delete the vid bcos he didn't know how. I went out, held out my hand & took the phone back. Other neighbour goaded me to report to the police & I did. Tw of them arrived before i could finish uploading the video! I showed the video & he said to just go & make a report(@station). The other came over with an authorative voice to behave like neighbours as we needed each other in times of trouble. He asked what was the issue & we should talk it out. So I told them my story. The POS tried to intterupt saying I was lying because I said he tapped me on the shoulder. He didn't hit me hard which was true.
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We have planted a lot of flowering plants outside our house ( still our property). A lot of people would just pluck away flowers saying they want to use it as offering in prayers. We honestly don't mind if you pluck a few flowers, but some people would literally pluck every single flower and even those flowers that are purely ornamental and cannot be used as offering.
I feel like most religions really frown on stealing things. So stealing something to give in offering kind of defeats the purpose.
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You know, I really like white mulberries, but I don't have this tree on my property. But one family in neighborhood had mulberry tree in their garden, so I guess I should hop over fence and go take some. Well, obviously I didn't do that, I offered that I pay them if they let me take some mulberries, They told me that I can take as much as I want for free, because they didn't like the fruit and kept the tree only for shade during summer. So I at least bought some sweets for their kids.
So wait. Wait. Is this article suggesting that someone OTHER than an American can be an obnoxious, self-absorbed, entitled idiot? Everything I know about Bored Panda is wrong...
There is a law of 'glanage' (gleaning) in France that gives people the right to go and gather unharvested, i.e. leftover, fruit or produce from farmland after the harvest has taken place, or if it's clearly not going to be harvested, i.e. the land is not being tended. There's an apple orchard, very overgrown, absent owner (due to absurd French inheritance laws) close to our house where I've sometimes done this. Sadly our own mirabelle tree is too far from the road, so in bumper years like this one, if I'm not around to pick them and/or don't have the time to prepare and use them they just rot on the tree :-(
If my neighbors ask, no prob. THey trespassed onto our farm when I was a kid? A warning. Steal something, then ...Rock salt in their butts. It was 1. legal 2. non-lethal and 3. discouraged complaints. I now live where it's "more civilized" and think my pear tree is their pear tree. No. Nor do I pick the cherries from *their* tree. It's called, shockingly, 'common courtesy'.
Just a friendly knock on the door to ask permission to pick some plums, along with an offer of, I don’t know, a plum cake, plum pudding, or hell a full dinner with the plums used in a condiment. Or to help him pick the rest of the plums——but not steal any!—-when he harvests the majority of them. Or something like that as a trade-off. That’s being both fair and neighborly. It’s what people who were raised right do. People who were raised by pissants steal then get all huffy and uppity when caught, just like that b***h did.
this happened to my aunt only it was pears instead of plums. she hated that people took them but even putting up fencing and signs didnt stop them. eventually she was getting on in years with declining health and simply couldnt keep up with it anymore. so she cut them down. it was only 2 or 3 trees and she ended up planting some sort of flowering tree or something in their place that didnt require anything from her but to admire the beauty. neighbors were effing pissed but couldnt do anything about it.
I have no sun in my back yard where one would normally plant their garden so years ago I started planting our garden out front. Mostly in containers. I now plant my heirloom tomatoes along the fence with my neighbor who happens to be one of my closest friends. They have permission to pick anything that grows through the fence though they never have. I asked if they'd mind me putting up a structure during the summer that was pretty tall to run string from to train my tomatoes up. They get to be about 8-9 feet tall unless I pick out a semi-determiniate variety that is more bush like. Her granddaughter loves helping me with my plants. She just turned 5. I grow peppers, tomatoes, squash, herbs, and a variety of other things. She grows stuff I don't, my mom grows a huge garden of all sorts of things and we all share with each other and several neighbors we are friendly with and want to share our bounty with. I make pesto, jar tomatoes, pickle peppers, dry some of the peppers. It's great.
In my country it's common that the overhanging branches and froot on those belongs to neighbors. If you don't want to share with neighbors then cutoff overhanging branches or that neighbor will cutt them off.
I posted a photo of my husband's gorgeous strawberry plants on Facebook. The next day they were gone. Stolen. Scary thing is my account is private and I'm not friends with anyone who lives anywhere near me. Odd coincidence? I don't know
Tinha um pé de Cajarana (Spondias dulcis) enorme no quintal dos meus pais, um dia uma vizinha veio reclamar, muito irritada, que meu pai havia cortado os galhos que estavam passando para o terreno dela, e por isso ela não teria frutas. Detalhe: essa vizinha não se dava com quase nenhum morador da rua e hostilizava a todos, meus pais inclusive. Foi inesperado e engraçado vê-la reclamando que nós podamos a árvore do nosso quintal.
We went to my grandparents a while back. They live in a rural area in a village and because gossip travels fast, I heard some relatives had their mango trees stripped off of the fruit in the middle of the night. All the ripe mangoes were gone, they found out later in the day.
I would like to hear, how this guy is speaking english with his french accent 🫣 Please, tell me again about that b***h stealing your plums. I'm all ears... 🙄
We were clearing a section of our front yard to landscape and our cross street neighbor asked if we were going to plant a community fruit tree! 😜
Ehm farmers can be young, you know. And it's more than likely that a French young person has studied English at school and therefore speaks it fluently. Also, he can be a son of a native English speaker parent, he might have lived abroad for a while, he might have a partner who's English and learned the language to be able to communicate with her, he might be English himself and living in France... The possibilities are plenty. A friend of mine has a bachelor degree, has lived in the US and France, he obvs speaks english and french and he's currently working as a farmer, by his own choice, he owns his own land and everything.
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First - funny thing, here in the USA...Idaho to be exact (at least where I live) it's illegal to even take overhanging fruit. If my apples fall onto your property, those are now yours. However, if you reach up and grab one, that is theft. The tree and its contents belong to whomever owns the property the trunk resides on.
That's interesting because in most places it a branch overhands your fence you can legally cut it down (at the fence line) and dispose of it or literally throw it back in the neighbours yard. So could you cut the branch off then pick up the fruit off the ground?
Load More Replies... I don't care if my neighbours take some of my lemongrass plant for their curries etc. But some of them are just maniacs that rip big bunches. Also my next door one is a real piece of work. The whole family almost. The daughter in law likes to sweep their garden clean and throw the rubbish on my side of the garden! The old lady herself broke my avocado tree branch that didn't even go over to her side of the fence. Her excuse was the ants would climb over(and jump? They couldn't climb over the wall? The worst was the son who literally revvs his cars(plural X 3) at all times of the day, for 5-30 minutes one after another. Comes home late at night drunk, throws rubbish onto my side of the curb. beer cans & cigarette packs. The idiot literally parks 1/3 of my gateway sometimes. They have 4 cars for a terrace house! I told the father not to park in front of my house and showed documentation of their encroachment and littering over the years. My patience ran thin one fine day.
My local police FB asked me to take evidence and I did. He was revving his car at 8pm and we couldn't watch tv or hear. I made a show of recording with HP. He shouted at me holding a small stick for recording exclaming he had 36 cases and was not afraid, kicked in my gate and snatch my phone demanding I delete the video. I turned around and the fidiot was still demanding i delete the vid bcos he didn't know how. I went out, held out my hand & took the phone back. Other neighbour goaded me to report to the police & I did. Tw of them arrived before i could finish uploading the video! I showed the video & he said to just go & make a report(@station). The other came over with an authorative voice to behave like neighbours as we needed each other in times of trouble. He asked what was the issue & we should talk it out. So I told them my story. The POS tried to intterupt saying I was lying because I said he tapped me on the shoulder. He didn't hit me hard which was true.
Load More Replies... We have planted a lot of flowering plants outside our house ( still our property). A lot of people would just pluck away flowers saying they want to use it as offering in prayers. We honestly don't mind if you pluck a few flowers, but some people would literally pluck every single flower and even those flowers that are purely ornamental and cannot be used as offering.
I feel like most religions really frown on stealing things. So stealing something to give in offering kind of defeats the purpose.
Load More Replies... You know, I really like white mulberries, but I don't have this tree on my property. But one family in neighborhood had mulberry tree in their garden, so I guess I should hop over fence and go take some. Well, obviously I didn't do that, I offered that I pay them if they let me take some mulberries, They told me that I can take as much as I want for free, because they didn't like the fruit and kept the tree only for shade during summer. So I at least bought some sweets for their kids.
So wait. Wait. Is this article suggesting that someone OTHER than an American can be an obnoxious, self-absorbed, entitled idiot? Everything I know about Bored Panda is wrong...
There is a law of 'glanage' (gleaning) in France that gives people the right to go and gather unharvested, i.e. leftover, fruit or produce from farmland after the harvest has taken place, or if it's clearly not going to be harvested, i.e. the land is not being tended. There's an apple orchard, very overgrown, absent owner (due to absurd French inheritance laws) close to our house where I've sometimes done this. Sadly our own mirabelle tree is too far from the road, so in bumper years like this one, if I'm not around to pick them and/or don't have the time to prepare and use them they just rot on the tree :-(
If my neighbors ask, no prob. THey trespassed onto our farm when I was a kid? A warning. Steal something, then ...Rock salt in their butts. It was 1. legal 2. non-lethal and 3. discouraged complaints. I now live where it's "more civilized" and think my pear tree is their pear tree. No. Nor do I pick the cherries from *their* tree. It's called, shockingly, 'common courtesy'.
Just a friendly knock on the door to ask permission to pick some plums, along with an offer of, I don’t know, a plum cake, plum pudding, or hell a full dinner with the plums used in a condiment. Or to help him pick the rest of the plums——but not steal any!—-when he harvests the majority of them. Or something like that as a trade-off. That’s being both fair and neighborly. It’s what people who were raised right do. People who were raised by pissants steal then get all huffy and uppity when caught, just like that b***h did.
this happened to my aunt only it was pears instead of plums. she hated that people took them but even putting up fencing and signs didnt stop them. eventually she was getting on in years with declining health and simply couldnt keep up with it anymore. so she cut them down. it was only 2 or 3 trees and she ended up planting some sort of flowering tree or something in their place that didnt require anything from her but to admire the beauty. neighbors were effing pissed but couldnt do anything about it.
I have no sun in my back yard where one would normally plant their garden so years ago I started planting our garden out front. Mostly in containers. I now plant my heirloom tomatoes along the fence with my neighbor who happens to be one of my closest friends. They have permission to pick anything that grows through the fence though they never have. I asked if they'd mind me putting up a structure during the summer that was pretty tall to run string from to train my tomatoes up. They get to be about 8-9 feet tall unless I pick out a semi-determiniate variety that is more bush like. Her granddaughter loves helping me with my plants. She just turned 5. I grow peppers, tomatoes, squash, herbs, and a variety of other things. She grows stuff I don't, my mom grows a huge garden of all sorts of things and we all share with each other and several neighbors we are friendly with and want to share our bounty with. I make pesto, jar tomatoes, pickle peppers, dry some of the peppers. It's great.
In my country it's common that the overhanging branches and froot on those belongs to neighbors. If you don't want to share with neighbors then cutoff overhanging branches or that neighbor will cutt them off.
I posted a photo of my husband's gorgeous strawberry plants on Facebook. The next day they were gone. Stolen. Scary thing is my account is private and I'm not friends with anyone who lives anywhere near me. Odd coincidence? I don't know
Tinha um pé de Cajarana (Spondias dulcis) enorme no quintal dos meus pais, um dia uma vizinha veio reclamar, muito irritada, que meu pai havia cortado os galhos que estavam passando para o terreno dela, e por isso ela não teria frutas. Detalhe: essa vizinha não se dava com quase nenhum morador da rua e hostilizava a todos, meus pais inclusive. Foi inesperado e engraçado vê-la reclamando que nós podamos a árvore do nosso quintal.
We went to my grandparents a while back. They live in a rural area in a village and because gossip travels fast, I heard some relatives had their mango trees stripped off of the fruit in the middle of the night. All the ripe mangoes were gone, they found out later in the day.
I would like to hear, how this guy is speaking english with his french accent 🫣 Please, tell me again about that b***h stealing your plums. I'm all ears... 🙄
We were clearing a section of our front yard to landscape and our cross street neighbor asked if we were going to plant a community fruit tree! 😜
Ehm farmers can be young, you know. And it's more than likely that a French young person has studied English at school and therefore speaks it fluently. Also, he can be a son of a native English speaker parent, he might have lived abroad for a while, he might have a partner who's English and learned the language to be able to communicate with her, he might be English himself and living in France... The possibilities are plenty. A friend of mine has a bachelor degree, has lived in the US and France, he obvs speaks english and french and he's currently working as a farmer, by his own choice, he owns his own land and everything.
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