A friend sent me a long argument about a website that was not done.
The agreement called for seven pages, a forum, a contact form, and a link manager for $500. A logo and publishing to more than one location also came up in the correspondence. The work started in August 2005 with a December 31 deadline.
It was now February.
The two sides did not agree on what had been delivered or what was still owed. My friend had paid $250. He said he built more of the material himself because he needed a professional site for client proposals. The other side counted a larger amount of page and installation work.
He wanted to know how I would answer without making the mess worse. Two shorter drafts followed the same day.
My part was review only. I was not on the contract, I did not build the site, and I was not in a position to decide which accusation was true. The names and claims do not need to be public.
The useful work was to pull the thread back to things both sides could document: the agreed scope, the deadline, what was actually online, what had been paid, and what would close the project.
I was running Praxis beside my SimAuthor job, so friends sent me technical business problems like this. This one was not a network failure or a server problem. It was a small website, a missed deadline, and a response that needed to be shorter and more professional than the argument it answered.