I live on a slight hill. Not enough to cause problems but enough that rain water will roll from my yard into my neighbor’s yard.

In what was the wettest year on record, there was enough rain that our basement got slightly wet and so did our neighbor’s. We then got a letter saying we were being cited by the county for expelling all our rain water onto her property. We got the county inspector to come on, examine the downspouts and confirm that they were correctly configured and could not be causing her basement problems.

She then started to threaten to sue us for property damage. We took legal advice and the lawyer basically laughed at her claim. She then started sending threatening emails to my wife, which she ignored. Finally, she made a huge mistake and sent a similar email to me. The mistake was that she used her company email and, about 10 years before, I had worked at the same company so knew that they had very strict rules on email use as it was regulated by the SEC.

At this point, I sent her an email explaining that she had no grounds to be making the threats and, more importantly, that making such threats on her company email was grounds for termination. I included a copy of the email policy for her review with the pertinent section highlighted. I explained that this was her last warning; we receive any kind of threat by any medium and EVERY email that she had ever sent to us would be forwarded to her HR department and to the SEC itself. Basically, she would have lost her job and would probably have never worked again.

Strangely, we never heard from her again.