"AITK for bagging every leaf on my property and leaving all 11 bags on my neighbors porch?"
A homeowner bags up leaves from their property.
Model representation of story events.
Let's take a look at the homeowner's original account of the events as she alleges they occurred…
In a story shared with the popular online community, the homeowner wrote that her neighbor has a landscaping crew that comes around to do upkeep and maintenance on his yard and property every week on a Thursday.
Part of this maintenance involves a leaf-blowing service. However, they don't pile and pick up the leaves.
Instead, they simply blow them over to the other side of their client's boundary line...
In this case, the person on the other side of that boundary happened to be this very frustrated homeowner.
In her account of events, the homeowner tells of how her neighbor's hired landscaping crew handled the maintenance of his property:
They mow, edge, blow everything off, done in under an hour. The problem is they use these big backpack leaf blowers and every single leaf on his property ends up on mine.
The homeowner goes on to describe how all of this started. She tells of the first time that she came home to find all of the leaves on her side of the property covering her yard and driveway. But she notes that, while she thought it was somewhat strange, she suspected nothing nefarious. She simply chalked it up to some unusual wind gust that had favored her side of the boundary line poorly.
My whole front yard was covered, driveway too, I figured wind or whatever and spent about an hour and a half raking and bagging it all up.
As a side note here, I think that this inclusion by the homeowner shows a reasonable and level-headed response that works in her favor when it comes down to the final verdict of whether or not she was wrong. Here, she clearly displays a willingness to handle the inconvenience that a supposed force of nature caused, without jumping to blaming others, which is typically how you'd expect a "Karen" to react.
Instead, she picked up a rake and spent her own time and energy solving a problem that had popped up. And properly solved the problem too, taking the time to dispose of the leaves properly.
Homeowner raking up leaves on their property.
Image for illustrative purposes.
But this happened second time. This time she was suspicious about the fact that the "wind" seemed to be originating precisely on her neighbor's property and blowing the leaves off of it, and the fact that this "wind" only occured on Thursdays.
Second Thursday same deal.
I raked again and didn't say anything because I wasn't sure it was actually them.
But she didn't have anything concrete to point to, merely suspicion.
That is, until the third week, when she witnessed the landscaping crew at work firsthand. She described what she saw in her own words in the original post.
Third week I was working from home and I watched the whole thing from my front window. 2 guys stood right at the property line with the blowers aimed at my yard and just went at it for like 15 minutes. His driveway, his flower beds, his walkway, all of it pushed onto my side.
When they finished his place literally looked like a magazine and mine had leaves plastered to my car and piled up against my front door. I went out and told the crew leader to stop blowing leaves onto my property. He basically said they’re hired to clean that yard and where the leaves end up after isn’t really their problem.
Colorful fallen leaves lie on the ground.
Stock photography for illustration of alleged scenes.
Enough was enough, and it was time to do something about the landscaping crew. But maybe her neighbor simply wasn't aware of what the landscaping crew was doing.
However, his response said a lot without saying much at all.
I texted my neighbor that night. He wrote back "dude they're leaves, they would have ended up on your side anyway, it's November."
When she clarified that they wouldn't have "ended up on [her] side anyway" the neighbor had no response.
I told him that is not what happened and I watched his crew do it on purpose. He left me on read.
Since her neighbor wasn't willing to lift a finger or do anything about it, the homeowner described how she responded.
That Saturday I spent the whole morning raking my property. 3 hours and 11 full yard waste bags later I walked every single one of them over to his front porch and stacked them by his door.
The neighbor quickly took to playing the victim here, posting about it on a local HOA social media page.
The following is the homeowner's own description of the events:
By Monday he'd posted in our HOA Facebook group about a "leaf Karen" who "dumped 11 bags of garbage on a homeowner's porch because she doesn't understand how wind works."
A neighbor down the street sent me the link. My husband thinks I proved my point but says I should drop it now. His crew came again this past Thursday.AITK?
She felt justified in her actions before, but it seems that the public social media attention has her wondering whether she overreacted and whether or not she is the "Karen."
My Thoughts
As someone who has lived most of my life where the vast majority of the trees are evergreen pine trees and don't drop their leaves, I have always found these neighborly disputes over leaves as fascinating as they are perplexing…
But it has never failed to amaze me how much of a problem deciduous trees can cause in these communities. Every fall, swathes of fallen, decaying leaves turn neighborhood communities into territorial battlegrounds as selfish residents seek to rid their property of leaves regardless of the effect their "solution" has on their neighbors.
I feel like there's definitely a metaphor for the erosion of the "social contract" in stories like these around fallen-leaf-ownership disagreements. These leaf-battle microcosms almost represent the larger issue of how we, as a society, often default to selfish solutions. "Passing the buck" or, in this case, blowing the leaves of our own problems off of our property and onto our neighbors… or the next generation.
Anyways, I digress. I'll spare you more of my waxing philosophy for now.
A landscaper uses a leaf blower to clear the leaves off a property.
No actual parties alleged to be involved are depicted.
The Landscaping Crew
Some credit is due here to the geniuses of the landscaping crew who have created this entire problem. Their somewhat comical solution to the problems presented to them by their work has let the cat out of the bag… and stuffed that bag full of leaves instead.
While they have correctly identified that the issue of the leaves presented to them has the premise "there are leaves on our client's property," and the proposed resolution is "Our task is to remove the leaves from our client's property," they have failed the task successfully by simply blowing them over the boundary onto the client's neighbor's property.
Let's take a look at this in a standard argument form:
Just for fun, if we were to structure the landscaping crew's argument into standard form, it would probably go something like this:
Premise 1: There are leaves on our client's property.
Premise 2: Our task is to remove the leaves from our client's property.
Premise 3: Blowing the leaves onto the neighboring property removes them from our client's property.
Premise 4 (assumption): Any method that removes the leaves from our client's property fulfills our responsibility, regardless of where the leaves end up.
---
Conclusion: Therefore, blowing the leaves onto the neighboring property fulfills our responsibility.
While this conclusion does present a solution to their problem, it's probably not the solution they're getting paid for. The assumption in Premise 4 that "any method" of removal satisfying the original task in Premise 2 is probably a bad assumption.
But it does probably save them the time, effort, and resources of piling up, bagging, and hauling the leaves themselves… and maybe that really is the entire point. So, unless their client himself stops them from doing it, they'll go with the path of least resistance… and effort.
While the neighbor is wrong in a lot of areas, he is right on one thing… They are just leaves. They are one of those things that's not really a big deal in the grand scheme of things. Still, watching someone get rid of their leaves by blowing them onto your property is one of those things that's comical when it's not happening to you. But, oh boy, I'll bet it's frustrating when it's happening in the moment.
So was the homeowner justified in her action? I'd say so; I think she fully matched the comical pettiness on display here, with some bonus style points.
But what did the responders think?
The Verdict
So, what was the final verdict?
This post was shared in Reddit's "Am I the Karen?" subreddit, where readers somewhat humorously subvert the "Karen" experience trope by submitting their own actions for evaluation by readers who can declare whether or not they were the "Karen."
Of 87 responses from distinct commenters that I was able to check, only 13 returned a clear verdict. All of these sided with the homeowner and said that she was "NTK" or "Not the Karen" here. Still, although they didn't declare a vote, I'd say that looking through the comments, around 9 in every 10 responses sided with her in some way. Some even declared that she hadn't been petty enough in her actions… These responders had some great suggestions of their own on what she could do next:
Commenter Zeal_of_Zebras had this humorous petty suggestion:
You should buy a leaf blower and blow back all the leaves onto his property immediately after the landscapers drive off.
I would work from home every Thursday to be that petty.
While another responder, kayina, suggested hiring the same exact landscapers to blow the leaves back onto the other side.
I would hire those people to do your lawn the day after they do his and blow them all back onto the other side.
In the midst of all this prevailing support, no commenters clearly judged her to be in the wrong or "the Karen."
Take a look at some of the other top responses in the images below.
Does anyone have their own thoughts to share on the topics discussed here? If so please reach out in the comments.
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