If something belonging to your neighbor goes over your fence, it still belongs to them.

If it causes damage to your property, however, they are responsible.

That’s what happened in this story.

Check out the story below and see how it was handled.

You wanna keep the coconuts?

Fair, Take this bill too

Back Story:

Our building and the neighboring building have a small wall between the two. On either side of the wall, we have parking areas, around 5 cars are parked on our side, and 3 on their side.

On their side, they also have a coconut tree that grows on the grounds of that building.

The tree leans over into the parking area of our building, and many a time the coconuts fall and sometimes they hit the cars parked below.

Wow. Seems rude, but OK.

Whenever a coconut does fall, the people of the neighboring building always come over to claim the coconut saying “The tree is on our grounds hence the coconut is ours.”.

They are very rude about it even though no one in our building bothers with taking the coconut or want to do anything with it.

The only problem we hold with the coconuts is that they damage our cars quite often and we’ve asked the neighboring building to do something about their tree because the tree lies on their grounds and we can’t do anything about it.

Main Story:

This time, it was my car’s turn.

Oh, I would be MAD.

It was parked under the tree and at about 7 in the morning, one of the coconuts fell and hit the windshield of my car, completely destroying it. It also dented the front hood of the car after bouncing off the windshield.

I heard the beeping noise from my car and immediately went to check on it, and low and behold, I find the people of the neighboring building on their way to take the coconut.

Now I don’t really care about the coconut, nor did I want it. I probably would’ve thrown it away anyway.

Were they trying to hide evidence?

But they could’ve taken the coconut away before I reached and I would’ve had no idea what happened to my car and how it happened, let alone explaining it to the people at the insurance.

I was extremely pissed off because they didn’t have any form of sympathy and they had the audacity to be rude about it telling me that the coconut is theirs and they don’t care what happened to the car, but an idea brewed in my mind.

Thank God for cameras.

Since I had CCTV footage of the coconut hitting the car (from our building’s security system), and the neighboring building loved to scream on top of their lungs about how the tree is theirs, and hence so are the fruits of it (yes coconuts are fruits).

I just claimed the amount on them, considering the damage was caused by their property.

They were pissed off when they were sent a letter about the situation and on learning the fact that they had to pay for the damages caused.

A couple of them immediately rushed to my home, essentially shouting at me for why I did it, and I simply said, “you can keep your coconuts all you want, your coconut broke my car, and now you have to pay for it”.

Hey, they were the ones saying the coconuts were theirs.

the society funds had to dish out about 14,000 rupees (approximately 200 US Dollars, which is a lot in India btw), and they weren’t happy about it at all.

Since then 2 coconuts have fallen from the tree (thankfully no cars were hurt those times), and I didn’t see anyone try to come and take the coconuts.

They had to pay 14000 rupees for trying to be petty about a 30 rupee coconut (eh I’d say 10-20 coconuts in the past maybe 3 years, so like 600 rupees worth of coconuts).

It sounds like the neighbors got just what they were asking for.

I bet the commenters on this post had a lot to say.

This user recommends charging a cleaning fee too!

Yeah, at this point there is no reason not to grab the coconuts.

This person talks about how the laws work in Denmark.

This really was predictable.

This person suggests that they put the neighbors on legal notice.

Keep your coconuts in your own yard.

Or pay for the consequences.

If you liked that story, check out this post about a group of employees who got together and why working from home was a good financial decision.