well, that escalated quickly...
today a coworker was asked if he could write a query to find customers which placed orders matching some criterias. so far so good. he write the query and put the result into a spreadsheet and gave it to the lead.
"i need it in another format" (he did not specify any format before nor did he tell which columns he is interested in). 2 hours later the query was finished.
then, the coworker got a call from the leader. he wants to see us both in his office.
"okay, we need to write a personalized mail to every customer with the orders in a spreadsheet as an attatchment. we also need this on paper as not everyone reads our mail. we want to send letters. the whole process needs to be finished in half a day and we want it automated. i do not want to have one of the sales department waste 2 hours writing stuff himself".

well, you can imagine my thoughts on that.

the personalized text is not finished. we wasted another 3 hours thinking about how to solve this crap.
luckily i have some projects from the past which can do this shit with some changes... but what the fucking hell was this?