December arrived. The mail tests were still there.
I ran the vacation responder again. It sent back the same deliberately wrong notice: gone, but really in the office.
Beatport was not the only system still asking for time. A former Praxis contact wanted to know whether I had moved a website and set up its email. The message opened with a question about my trip and went straight into the unfinished handoff.
Praxis was winding down, but the client systems did not disappear on the same date. The site still needed a destination. The mail still needed to work. Somebody still needed an answer.
Both jobs landed on email because every organization had its own accounts, routes, lists, forwarding rules, and old decisions. Beatport was the new full-time system. The consulting work remained attached to me until I finished handing it back.
I did not write the exact configuration change into each test. I had repeated messages and two organizations waiting for mail to behave.
The client request was specific. Move the website. Set up the email. I had not finished both parts yet.
The old work did not care that I had a new title and a new company. The website still lived somewhere. The mailbox still needed a working destination. Until somebody else could operate both, they were still attached to me.
At Beatport, I could send another one-word test and watch the route. The client handoff needed a real answer and a clean transfer. Both were email problems, but only one belonged to the job I had just taken.