It’s your decision here who the horrible neighbor really was; I know where my sympathies lie.
My parents own a very nice, very large house situated on the top of a small hill. Back when I was living with them, we had a new family move in across the street.
Now, a few ‘should be obvious’ facts. A hill is only a hill because it is higher than the ground around it. Ergo, the land outside of our property- such as, say, my neighbor’s place- would be on lower ground. Water rolls downhill. Ergo, when rain falls upon our property, it rolls downhill into the surrounding, lower land. Such as my neighbor’s property.
The previous neighbors had built a small ditch near the street in order to collect the rainwater that flowed into their property; after all, otherwise, their front yard would become a swamp. New neighbors decided that the ditch made their front yard looked bad, and filled in the ditch. Needless to say, next time it rained, their yard filled with water and became a morass. New neighbors decided that this was our fault because much of the offending water was rolling off our property, and therefore it was our responsibility to build a ditch in our property. This started with a phone call as a request for us to build a ditch. My father, not one to suffer fools lightly, pointed out that the realtor and previous owners had explained the situation to new neighbor, and new neighbor buying the house meant the acceptance that it was new neighbor’s problem, not my fathers.
Next rainfall, new neighbor calls us and bitchs out my father for not having built a ditch. For the next several storms, new neighbor would call our house and shout a string of profanities at whomever picked up the phone (including, at one point, my eleven year-old sister) about us ‘selfish bastards’ and his ‘property values’ etc.
That winter, it snowed. (Oh, yeah, big surprise. Sorry; I’m not good at segues yet.) Our road was way the hell away from the main roads, and usually didn’t get cleared until late in the evening. As a result, usually my father hired a private snowplow to come clear our street so that he and the rest of the neighborhood could get to work.
The first time he did this after new neighbor moved in (and remember, we’ve had all summer to receive nasty notices and calls from new neighbor), the police showed up on our door that night. The police officers politely informed us that new neighbor had called them to complain about the snowplow my father had hired; specifically, that the snowplow had taken all of the snow off the street and maliciously dumped in into new neighbor’s driveway so as to prevent him from being able to leave his house. My father, seething, explained to the police that no such order had been given, and he pointed to the sides of the street where snow had been pushed as it usually was. The police were friendly and bored, and obviously knew they were being sent off to deal with a crank call, and pleasantly left.
My father fumed for a while, partly out of pure exasperation over new neighbor, partly out of self-kicking that he hadn’t thought to tell the snow plow to do that in the first place. Eventually, we all went to sleep; and the new neighbor didn’t complain about us for a few years (though relations were always strained).
I’m not sure what finally drove it into new neighbor’s head that he should shut the hell up- whether it was his lawyer telling him that there was no law forcing us to build a ditch for the rainwater; the cops telling him not to waste their time again; or the fact that, the night after the police showed up, my father rose from bed at 3 in the morning, snuck over to the neighbor’s driveway, and performed some impromptu surgery on new neighbor’s van’s engine with a ballpeen hammer.
Nothing to compare to Phil’s story, I admit, but the thought of my father skulking through the snow with ballpeen hammer in hand and malice in mind always makes me laugh.