Endless Thread - Snacktime: The Cebu Swiper

Episode Date: March 30, 2021

In this Snacktime episode, we explore a post made on r/HobbyDrama about how some local plant-trading Facebook groups have had their wholesome hobby corrupted by an alleged scammer.

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Produced by the I-Lab at WBUR, Boston. Emery, what's up? What's up? Spring has sprung. Wing! That's what it did, where I live, anyway. Is that what it sounds like? Yeah.

Spring sprung. Yeah. Yeah. We missed you guys while working on our new exciting things. that we're working on. And also one of our listeners sent us a story that we wanted to talk about. So we just, you know,

we blew the dust off the old computer keyboard, fired up those microphones. And here we are. Our sound effect game has fallen by the wayside. We can no longer afford a sound designer. So we have to do it, you know, we got to do it. it like the guy, that guy from Police Academy.

What's that? Oh, my God. Just never mind. Just your monthly reminder that Ben is very old. Emory, you kind of know what this is about. And you're a millennial, and I've seen the hanging plants in your house on Zoom calls that we do every day. Like, while you're eating breakfast and I'm actually hard at work at my desk. I have one hanging plant.

But it's, it's, you've just boosted its ego quite a bit that you think it's. Nice. Yeah. Do you have a green thumb? No. I'm working on it. It's, I'm a work in progress. I have a, I have a, I have a, lemony, limey thumb.

Serious question. Mm-hmm. Do you feel like as a millennial, plants are big among the millennialsals? I don't know if I would generalize quite like that. I think plants are having a year, house plants in particular, because we are obviously spending more time at home and we realize we want beautiful nature to look at all the time if we're going to be stuck indoors. So I have definitely upped my plant game recently. I've adopted more plants this year from people who didn't feel like they could take care of them. I have killed some of those plants inadvertently,

and some of them are still kicking. And some of them refuse to die, like this aloe plant that I have completely abandoned and only gets in my way, but it wants to live. So it's not just you. There's a lot of reporting on this. Apparently, there's been an explosion in house plants, especially over the last year.

And the explanations are sort of why, ranging, like a connection to nature and an increasingly screen-based world, right? Some people have said that it's like a stand-in for children for younger generations who have been screwed by like student loan debt and the housing crisis and lots of other stuff. They do all have names, the plants in my house. Is that true? Yeah, every single one. So here's a reason, I think, for the explosion that I believe in.

Or maybe it's a little bit, it's two reasons. So for one, if you're lucky to have been employed through this crazy time, you have extra income maybe, and you're like spending it in your immediate environment, right, like on your immediate environment. And part duh is that plants make us feel better. It's science, apparently, caring for plants in your house legit, like reduces anxiety and gives you a more positive outlook on life. I believe it. I believe it, too. But you don't even have to because I think it's technically science. I don't know.

That's what I'm going to say. Yeah, you live it. You don't want to hear what I would sound like without those house plants. Same. I would say the same is true for me. Plants, you know, they improve people's, you know, they create a positive outlook on life. Except Amory when they don't. Because drama.

And this story, which a listener sent us, started where lots of drama. starts. The mall. Facebook groups. I like that you said the mall. Yeah. That's good. Wow, talk about being old. But yes, Facebook groups.

Yeah. Okay, so the observation of this person who lives in a city in the Pacific Northwest, this person that we are going to talk about and talk to you, is that there's just been this explosion of house plant trading Facebook group communities. So lots of Facebook groups based around house plants. People talking about care, where to buy new plants, and also even picking up plants for one another and dropping them off in COVID times. And this person that we're about to hear from, they are the member of a local group, a local plant. care and house plant group where a lot of this stuff is happening.

And according to them, uh, this gets kind of intense, at least in the group that they're a part of, or the group of groups that they're a part of in their local area, with the good vibes. So people are like picking up plants for other people, dropping them off,

buying plants for each other, like buying a plant for someone else so that they can pick it up. Oh. Yeah. It's like good vibes all around. And you know what eventually happens with good vibes. They turn to bad vibes. They wither like the plant that you thought you could get away with not watering.

Well, it's almost like that the plant was over water. The good vibes were overroval. There was too much good vibes, I think. Yeah. And then the leaves turned yellow and bugs that started to appear. Yeah. They get ruined by people who don't subscribe to. the culture of the group, so to speak. You see what I did there? Culture.

Okay. So there's this kind of rare and expensive plant, apparently, called a blue Cebu. You know what that is? No. Or maybe it's Kebu. I'm not sure. C-E-B-U? Yeah. Okay. Nope, still don't know it. Just wanted to be able to visualize. Yep. So this plant pops up at a Home Depot in the local area, and someone in this group arranges a pickup. where they're going to grab a bunch of plants for a bunch of different people, including this blue Cebu. And when the guy shows up, some random person has already picked up the plants reserved for other people.

Oh, no. And this person's name is apparently Wendy. We'll call her Wendy. Hmm. Okay. So now I'm going to read something from this post that ends up on the subreddit community. hobby drama. Quote, I'm not sure exactly how this was figured out,

but after people did some heavy internet sleuthing, people figure out that a woman named Wendy had been watching the group for these pop-ups of local rare plants rushing over and reading the list of names from the coordinating thread to the staff at the store in order to collect all the reserved or prepaid plants for herself. Then she was chopping them up

and quickly reselling them on Facebook Marketplace at two to five times. the original price of the plant itself. Whoa. Chopping them up. Yeah, because that's kind of like, apparently, you know, you and I are not plant experts, but this is how you propagate plants.

Yeah. You make cuttings. You do the cuttings. Okay. Yeah. So you get like a nice one and then you make some cuttings and you plant it in new pots and then you sell those cuttings. Okay.

What do you think? I think Wendy's a little witch. Wendy the witch. And this apparently kind of like wrecks the group. Like it destroys the kind of like confidence in the group that people are going to like take care of each other. And people like freak out. They're really going after Wendy for screwing them over. What have they taken steps?

Have they, I mean, have they, how has Wendy been approached, confronted? Well, that's what I think we're about to. to find out about. We are going to talk to Colleen. Okay. Who wrote the post and watched all of this go down in the group. Okay. When we come back, Colleen.

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Become a thought leader. Recruit new talent. Reach new audiences. Whatever your goal, we can help. Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org slash creative studio. Colleen, thank you very much for being willing to chat with us. Thank you for finding my strange Reddit post that I wrote while I was outrageously high. And please.

that you enjoyed it. That's the best. So, Colleen, can you give us, like, what is, if you were to tell this story in 30 seconds, how would you tell it? I think it would be panic-induced house plant growth of group, tests out social and trust norms performatively and learns a lesson

when a scammer takes advantage of their performative niceness or even maybe real niceness maybe it was real. So what she has been accused of specifically is that sometimes a local plant shop, Home Depot, Yieldy plant shop, will have a rare plant

and someone will post and say, hey guys this plant's here and then people will say oh no i'm stuck at home until x time it's going to be sold out by then and someone else will say buddy let me help you out let me pick up this plant for you and i will bring it to you and people are like oh my gosh you're such a nice person thank you so much and what she's been accused of doing is kind of following along in those posts and picking up the plants that people either have called the store and reserved and said hey will you hang on to this for me and my friend, or they called ahead and paid, and she picked up those prepaid ones. Have you, Colleen, ever met Wendy?

No. No. Okay. But do you, but you've interacted on Facebook with her, presumably? The way that I know Wendy is through the plant Facebook group. I did notice that Wendy was really, really, really active in the group. She was very intense about like somebody wanted a free plant or if someone was offering a free plant. She was very quick to say, I'd like that plant.

She was very active in the selling groups. And then after a period, I started to notice that a lot of people, her name came up a lot in terms of like, do not give your plant to this woman. She will sell it to somebody for money. She's violating the spirit of the group. And then there was a whole bunch of groups that banned her all at once. And then there was a whole bunch of common threads of people saying, like, I always, I never liked her. I always felt like she was reselling more than she was gifting.

And you haven't tried to reach out to Wendy. No, she seems kind of mean. So I thought that the kind of follow-up or edit to your post was really interesting because it made me realize for the first time that this story wasn't just the story of like this pro-house plant community being taken advantage of by this villain Wendy and that maybe things were a bit, maybe quite a bit more nuanced than that in your view. Can you talk about what you see as the kind of politics and COVID-L? layers that are in there and or also would be happy to hear you kind of read the edit to your post, if that makes sense?

Sure. So my city has seen COVID widen an already huge economic divide. I have friends who were able to buy a weekend cabin with the savings from being stuck at home during lockdown. I have friends who haven't been able to find work since July. So for what I've seen in the plant groups, there's a group of people, me included, or stuck at home, getting into a new hobby, maybe have some extra money on their hands, and for social political reasons, are invested in making sure that people view them as good people. They're chatty,

they give plants away, they make posts where they thank people from doing favors in the group for helping them make new friends. The second group of people I've observed in these groups does not seem to be doing as well. They're selling more. You can see in there for sale pictures that their spaces are jammed with propagation. They are all business. I didn't make it clear. I didn't make it clear enough that I don't have evidence that these people are aggressively plant side hustling because they're dealing with the economic fallout from COVID, but the timing, context, and what I see around other groups makes me wonder. And that had been to a dynamic, I think, windy, perfectly embodied by both stealing plants that were paid for or reserved for other people. It's like, fuck you.

I need this more than you. And if you're going to be dumb enough to post information about where this desirable, potentially prepaid thing that I can sell for money is, then you deserve to have it taken away. So you posted this on Reddit, and you didn't mention the exact location of this particular plant group, right? You said something like, if you want to know where I am, reach out, or something like that. Did you hear from anyone from Reddit? Yeah, I heard from a ton of people.

You did. And was anyone also a part of that group who reached out to you and kind of, you? and kind of verified your characterization of it? Or what was the response? Yes, absolutely. I definitely had some people reach out and be like, I know exactly who you're talking about. And then I also had some people reach out and say,

is it San Diego? Is it Portland? Is it San Francisco? Is it Olympia? And I was like, no. But funny that there appears to be a windy in every single West Coast City. Every plant group has its Wendy.

Every plant group has it's Wendy. I'm curious if you had any questions for Wendy. Like, if we get Wendy to talk to us, is there anything that you would like to know? Yeah, totally. Okay, let me, I have some specific questions. I really want to know if she actually has some, like, really good connection hookup to these rare plants instead of doing what these groups

accuser of doing, which is just like doing the same thing as everybody else, but faster not a larger scale. Hmm. Anything else? I guess I, this is so specific, but I would love to know. Okay, there's another post she made. This guy in my local plant group was crying about some plants, someone else bought before him, and I was selling cuttings from a plant.

I bought from a reseller, and he messaged me, harassing me, and I told him that I took his plants to hurt his feelings, and it worked. Oh my God, I hadn't read that all the way through. I love that. Two years later, he's still crying about it. It's a leap, y'all. Also propagating isn't a scam. Everyone does it, all your favorite plant stores, but when I do it, they call me names. So I want to know what her, like, personal propagation policies are. And one of the accusations from the Facebook groups is like she's selling bad propagation, um, nodules that she should know that won't root. Hmm.

Um, so you want to know if she's like the real deal, like if she knows how to do it and is doing it effectively. Yeah, totally. Fair. Well, Colleen, this is, this is, um, like I said, we will report back if we talk to her. And, um, this has been fascinating. I've learned a lot. and thank you for being ridiculously high and writing something on the internet.

You're welcome. Don't sound so defeated. We're at the beginning. We're at the beginning of something that could bring understanding and honesty. Yeah, that was like a big sad sigh. Why the sad sigh? Oh, I just don't want my mom to know that I was high when I wrote it. Does your mom listen to our show?

Yeah. Well, we're a big NPR family and they're very familiar with you guys. Oh, wow. Hi, Colleen's mom. We can say that you weren't high. That's fine. No, let's just be honest. I was super high.

It was great. I enjoyed myself. There you go. You're an adult, Colleen. You're an adult. It's legal. In Washington? Yeah.

Okay. And in Boston. And it's a plant. It's a plant. Will you just? say, Gail, it's fine. Gail. It's fine. It's fine. It's fine. Thank you. Yeah, Gail, it is fine.

Bye, Colleen. So, Amory, we got Wendy. We got Wendy. Oh, you're so unfair. Like, you bought all the plans and blah, blah, blah, and like, you're selling them and this and this and that or whatever. So I was just like, okay, whatever. So Wendy, who should be in quotation marks here, because I'm not sure. her real name is Wendy. She sent us some voice memos explaining her side of the story.

She later decided that she didn't want us to use her voice memos. And so we kind of, you know, we're going to respect that mostly. No matter how

like much I explain it to people or tell them, they're going to believe whatever they want to believe. But what Wendy said sort of boil down is she's not guilty of what Colleen and people in the house plant Facebook groups are accusing her of. She doubled down that she has her own hookups where she gets the rare plants. She propagates. She doesn't sell ones that won't actually grow. She denied that she is trying

to get rich quick by cashing in on the house plant explosion. And she also said she's been in the house plant business for years and got her green thumb from her dad who taught her all she knows. Oh. What about the blue Cebu? Yeah, so this is really tricky, right? Like, it's a little bit of a they said versus she said, right? Wendy says she never swiped anyone's blue Cebu and that the real Cebu swiper is still at large, she claims. She did bring up the post, Colleen mentioned, where Wendy supposedly admits to swiping prepaid Cebu, but says that she was just trolling to get a rise out of people who have already made their minds up about her.

So basically, she says, ha ha, L-O-L, I didn't do it. It wasn't me. I just said that I did it to mess with the people who thought it was me, which I find to be a little suspect of a response. Yeah. When you just raise suspicion around yourself for fun. Yeah. Yeah, my favorite thing to do is admit that I did something that people accuse me of just for the lulls. I love when everyone hates me.

But I guess we'll never, we'll never know until Wendy, quote unquote, Wendy decides to become more forthcoming. Yeah, and look, I'm interested in listeners, like, take on this. So send us an email. tell us what you think the real story is. Obviously, the post is in our show notes. And if you have a surefire way of solving this crime, especially in the days of COVID, and want to suggest it to us, we're happy to hear it. Because I want to know if Wendy is really the blue Cebu Thief. The Sebu Swiper. The Seaboo Swiper. Yeah, that's the name. The Seibo Swiper. Or if you just have a house plant that you're particularly proud of for keeping alive. You can send that to us too, not the plant. Keep the plant. Keep the plant. Send the plant. Send us a photo. Send us a photo of your houseplants.

Yeah. What about that? Plant picks. Plant picks. Man, all people always sliding into my DMs with plant picks. PM me or plants, girl. Okay. It's back to work for us. We have a new slate of episodes that we're cooking up. And we'll have those for you as soon as we can. And in the meantime, of course, take care.

Get vaccinated. Hug each other. Take care of your plants, too. Water those damn plants. But not too much, but not too little. Just red.