Sarumun marches on, but Helm's Deep shall not fall, as long as men defends it!

Warning: These stories are technical in nature

Story #1
Last week, I was given a bug fix request. The consultant did not gave me support but asked me to read the documentation. After studying the code for a full day, I figured out how to run it and found.. nothing wrong with it.
She studied the code and found 2 lines of code which she believed should fix the error. Boss was very happy and was on the verge of throwing a new task to me. JW however tested it again and found.. nothing wrong with it.
I caught hold of her and proved it to her that it works. She left, puzzled.
"Maybe you should test in the QA server", my boss suggested. JW did and found.. nothing wrong with it.
"I still encountered errors in the UAT server", the consultant said. JW spent half a day in the UAT room to recreate the test data and found.. nothing wrong with it.
"It can't be", she said. She tested it and found something wrong with it.
I was prepared and pointed out what was not wrong with it. The material number we are viewing is not the one we believed we should view. Heavy customisation in this "big government project" has redirected us to another material number.

Hard to imagine that this simple thing dragged over 6 days?
Harder still to convince people that I'm right.

Story #2
My desk buddy is Joseph, who's a hacker at heart. He likes to know the internal workings of things. His problem was a program that will give a dump upon execution. Upon analysis, we found that the previous programmer has coded it in such a way that the SQL compiler on the database end was overwhelmed, like some 4000 values for a single field. Since I was shaking legs while waiting for people to believe me (see Story #1), I looked into this problem with him. Together, we had a solution to simplify the SQL statement while not sacrificing performance.
As the consultant for this program was not proactive in verifying his changes, his manager was roped in to test it. I don't know what possessed him, but he looked into the code and picked faults at it.
"Why did you code this way? MY company doesn't do it this way. Its so hard for my consultants to read!". What "went wrong" was that Joseph arranged the comment fields to 72 characters per line, which made perfect sense to us but not to him. He prefers the comments to stretch on and on, off the visible width of the screen.
He also picked fault with the coding we made. That the changes we did "disturbed" the original logic coded by his company. He even gave suggestion on how to code it.

Translation: our solution can't be better than what his company comes up with.

"What the??!!", our team was flabbergasted upon hearing his commandments from Joseph. The first could be dismissed due to lunacy. The second just show outright lack of technical understanding on his part. In short, he wanted Joseph to download the entire content of the tables and then filter it off.
Joseph was rather unhappy with complying. By following that guy's "orders" to revert the codes, he'll be re-introducing the same problem that caused the dump. If he follows his suggestion to fetch everything, its not efficient and doesn't sit well with him. Newly corrupted JW told him to heck care, just do as that smart aleck says, an interesting reversal of roles.

[Just before they left office, JW reverted back to his old ways and coded a possible alternative solution]