My friend Michael sent me a joke about which I had to laugh. I also remembered that I had heard the joke quite a while ago but in a slightly different way:

Once, a farmer and his wife decided to grow potatoes on one of their fields which had been lying fallow for a long time. They had a small farm and no helpers, they did everything on their own. However when they went out onto the field to dig it over, they realized that it was too much work and very hard work for the two of them. Longingly they looked over to their neighbor’s field where the neighbor’s five young and strong sons were working together on the field. Not too far away the neighbor himself was standing on his field watching his sons.

When seeing this, the clever woman had an idea. Knowing that their neighbor was listening, she leaned forward to her husband and – louder than necessary for him to hear her – she said: “I am sure this is the field where your grandfather buried the gold! Now we just have to dig for it and then we will be rich!” On their way back to their house they noticed how their neighbor hurried towards his sons.

The next morning, when they came back to the field they saw that it had been nicely dug over, just like plowed and they could finally start planting their potatoes. Their neighbor, tired from a whole night of digging and angry about the woman’s trick was sitting on his own field asking himself how he could have been so credulous.