I thought this might give you guys a chuckle :)

Two and a half years ago, my husband and I bought a beautiful 10-acre parcel of land. There are several other very nice homes around it, on similar-sized lots. The neighbors we met were all positively delightful, and we were looking forward to building there. There was an oooold (like 100-plus-year-old) private drain tile that ran across the property halfway back, but we weren't terribly concerned about it, as it was nowhere near where we planned on building.

Last summer, we met the guy across the street. We'll call him "Stan," because that's his name. :) We were out at our property with a native plants consultant, and Stan barged over and started ranting about how his property hadn't drained properly ever since the people next door built their house (apparently they'd hit the private tile while building, but maintained their contractor had fixed it), and that someone was going to pay to fix it. We finally had to tell him, "Look, we're paying by the hour here; we're not talking about this now."

A couple months later, we went to walk over our property and discovered a couple of really deep pits dug on our property. The neighbors told us Stan had been out there, looking for spots where the drain tile had broken. Sure enough, you could see the broken tile at the bottom, but who was to say whether it was that way to begin with, or if he'd broken it while digging?

We went over to his house, and he started off pleasantly but then started his haranguing us about his drainage issues. We told him, "Look, if someone caused your drain issues, it was NOT US, because we haven't done a thing to this property." We insisted he fill in the holes (what if someone fell in one?!) and told him he did NOT have permission to be on our property after that.

So, we talked to the drain commissioner, and a drain-law attorney, and discovered that he couldn't really MAKE us do anything, but we decided if the tile needed to be replaced, we would chip in, to be neighborly.

We didn't hear anything from any of the neighbors for a long time. Then, I called our next-door neighbors the other day for an update and found out they had spent a lot of money to replace the section of tile on their property, which had apparently fixed the drainage issue.

In fact, it drained so well that apparently Stan's pond has entirely disappeared. I laughed my butt off ;)