Bit of a different context, but I thought the sentiment would be appreciated.

While I was in law school, over the summer I interned at a state child welfare office. Whenever a caseworker needed a copy of a court order, they would send an email to my boss, who would forward it to me. I would write down the case number and order date, and go down four floors to the clerk's office in the basement. I'd give them the case number and order date, they would pull the order, make a copy of it, and give me the copy. I would then go back up four floors to our office and scan the copy of the order to my computer, and email it to my boss who would forward it to the caseworker. 

I had never fully appreciated the futility of bureaucracy until that moment.

During a meeting with a relatively new client, I noticed the left side of my face was starting to go numb. I mentioned this during the meeting, and terrified that I may have been having a stroke I ended up going to urgent care afterward. It turned out to be Bell's Palsy, which is annoying but mostly harmless and usually heals within weeks or months. I told the client about this the next day and got on with my work.

Two weeks later, the client asked me if I'd completed work on something I didn't recall discussing with her at all. I asked her when she'd asked me to do this as I had no emails or records about it, and she said she'd brought it up during the meeting two weeks earlier.

Me: You mean the meeting where I thought I was having a stroke?

Client: Yes.

Me: I wasn't really mentally present, as I'm sure you can understand, and you've not mentioned it to me since.

Client: When I ask you to do something I expect to see it done.

Me: I understand that, but you asked me to do this during a meeting when I was having a stroke.

Client: That's not a good enough excuse. If you'd been working with me longer I might understand, but you've only been on this project a few weeks.

Me: How long do I have to have been working with you for it to be okay for me to have a stroke during a meeting?

Shockingly, the client didn't have an answer. I ended up leaving the project not long after that.

Client: Why are you not designing the website?

Me: You haven't told me anything about what you want. What will this website be? Where is the content? What should it include? Who is visiting the site?

Client: You can design a site without content.

Me: Without content or context, I have no idea what to design.

Client: Well then. It seems we are at an impasse. 

Client: When you finished the web banners, they should not have gone live on the website immediately after.

Me: You gave your okay and told me to submit them to the person that is in charge of site content. You even saw them live on the websites and said they were okay. You didn't have a problem then.

Client: But don't you know that stuff like this normally goes through a process before it goes live on a website?

Me: You mean 'staging'?

Client: Yes! That! Why didn't you just do that?

Me: Because you don't HAVE any staging. That's how your websites were built. That's why everything goes live as soon as it's submitted for site content.

I maintain a local real estate website.

New listings are added when I receive the listing details and photos from the receptionist. I regularly receive incomplete details without photos or photos without listings, and it can take weeks for the needed items to be supplied.

Multi-million dollar residential projects for foreigners are big business here and the agent has started to add several to the website so they can sell units. The units start at $500K and the commission would be substantial so it’s in their interest to display the projects as well as possible.

Client: Here’s a residential project that needs to be added to the website. I don’t have the text in a Word document. Kindly let me know if you can work with it.

Attached is a Word document with the text embedded as images.

Me: Yes, I can work with the text. It’ll just take a little longer to type out. Do you have photos for the project?

A month passes with no response.

Me: I still don’t have any photos for the project. Obviously, photos will showcase the project better than text can on its own. I can create a page without photos but to sell the project it would be better if people can see how it would look.

Client: Add the project to the website with just the text.

I’m starting to lose patience.

Client: This is a total disaster, you’ve printed all these stickers with the wrong date on them. It should be 30th October as per the email below. I am very annoyed that you can’t follow a simple instruction!

Me: I’m sorry for the error, I’ll fix that right away. Just to check though, your email says 31st October. We do have a sign off procedure and that is the date you signed off on.

Client: Well I didn’t read it when I signed it off. I’m a key account holder, I’m too important to check details like that!