Sunny contracted out the design of four postcards to a copywriter on Elance (handy service, btw). The person in question said she could come up with some nice copy and designs, given the parameters we had provided, within a week. She also, however, said that "the bid includes all revisions until you are 100 percent satisfied." She would learn to regret that statement.

That was two months ago. Over that period Sunny has completely thrown out his instructions and started over TWICE (despite nitpicking how I wrote them out until they were "flawless" every time). It's become clear that he doesn't have a clue what he actually wants and just intends to keep working the poor contractor until she stumbles across something he likes by dumb luck. Said contractor, meanwhile, has had to subcontract some of the work out to others when it started drifting outside her area of expertise.

Today I got an email. In brief, it stated that she has obviously "not been able to meet your expectations" and would respectfully like to withdraw from the project. She'll be refunding her half-in-advance to do this.

She's smarter than I am...