Grand Theft...

[pat]

The MVPD officer just left.

Someone came in last night and stole all the tangerines off of our backyard tree. And I do mean all the tangerines. Even the ones off the top of the tree that we had left because they were too hard to reach. Every last one. We're talking well over 200 of the little orange suckers. They even took some of the fallen fruit.

They didn't touch the bikes, or the scooter that belongs to James's friend. They did not steal the lawn mower or the weedeater. The car was accidentally left unlocked, but there was no sign that anything had been disturbed. We can see no sign that they tried to enter the house. If they did, they left my laptop, the most valuable easily portable thing in the house.

Just the tangerines. And the officer pointed out that this had to have been a planned crime -- they would have needed boxes to get the fruit out of the yard.

All of this happened less than ten feet from my bedroom window, and I slept through all of it. The only thing I can think is that the noise of my CPAP drowned out the sounds of people climbing the ladders. (The ladders had been left in the back yard to harvest fruit, but they were moved out of position and one which had been flat on the ground was open and standing up.)

I am annoyed and a little angry about losing the tangerines -- they were pretty good ones. But they were little, nowhere near commercial size. What would someone do with them? I am at a loss there.

But I am really freaked out about the invasion aspect. What if they had broken into my house? I would not have heard them.

I really wish brian1789 were not away on travel.

Comments

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

It seems unlikely that somebody who would grab a bunch of tangerines but leave a lot of other valuables lying around would break into your home, if that's at all comforting. I find that people often don't thik of such things as property and view it as "not stealing, really".

I recently saw a woman in sort of hippy-ish clothing wandering down the street. Sticking out of her backpack she had a container with a bunch of flowers in a bouquet type of thing. She stopped at one point, opened her backpack, and took out some clippers. She then stepped into someone (front) yard and clipped a rose off of their rose bush. She put it into the container with the other flowers, put the clippers away, and continued onward, not a care in the world. I was kind of floored because my first thought if I ever pondered something like that would be, "How would I feel if I came home and someone had cut my carefully-tended rose bush?" which would be enough to stop me right there, but I suspect that she just thought, this is a thing of nature, I am a child of nature, I have as much right to this as this person does.

(Similarly, I once saw an old, slow-moving Chinese lady stroll, taking a good minute to do so, onto someone's front porch in my neighbourhood, take out a bag, pick all of their tomatoes from their front porch box garden, put them in her bag, walk back out and continue on her way. WTF?)

[patgreene.livejournal.com]

She then stepped into someone (front) yard and clipped a rose off of their rose bush.

That's behavior one would expect from kids -- and I've trained mine out of it (mostly). Adults should know better. I mean, what happened to people saying to their kids, well before adulthood, "What if everybody did that?" or "How would you feel if that were *your* rosebush?" ?

[erin-c-1978.livejournal.com]

I find that people often don't thik of such things as property and view it as "not stealing, really".

Yup. During one session of the botanical art class I took a while back, the instructor was chatting with us about the growing problem of landscape theft. One of the stories she told was about the experience of a friend of hers, who walked out her front door to find someone digging up her trilliums and loading them into a pickup trick. When the instructor's friend objected, the thief said, "Oh, you have plenty" -- and continued digging them up!

[mactavish.livejournal.com]

It's different because it's random kids, but I was once housesitting for friends who had a big tree full of almost-ripe apricots in the front yard. From in the kitchen at the back of the house, I heard a *smack* and yelling, and ran out front to find half the tree on the ground, split, and the kid who had been on the branch rubbing her butt as she raced away, about fifty feet behind her friends who had a head start. I picked the apricots that were now on the branch on the ground and preserved them, but I was pissed -- there went a good tree.

But those were random kids in the daylight grabbing a snack, not intentional tree-stripping.