I just thought of another one, though not work-related. Last September, my uncle was having an Autumn get-together, the type of thing where people bring food and so on. I was asked to bring something, which I was fine with. I asked what I should bring, and they said "anything is fine", so I decided to make ginger bread cookies.
The morning of the party, my uncle called and my mom intercepted the call. I was in the kitchen, rolling chilled ginger bread dough into balls, rolling the balls in some sugar, and putting them on a cookie sheet. I overheard my mom on the phone, saying, "Well, she's already bringing something. Yeah, she's making it now. *a pause, then* I'll ask her." I looked up as my mom stuck her head in the kitchen, and she said that my uncle wanted me to bring a batch of cornbread. That's not the absurd part;
that part came when I expressed reluctance to do more work.
When I said that I was already making the cookies, and it was taking a little longer than I thought it would, I overheard my uncle saying (and he must have overheard me, because my mom hadn't relayed what I said back to him yet), "Ask her to make the cornbread, too. We'll eat it." and eventually, "Well, I don't see why she can't if she's already baking!"
I made the cornbread to avoid a big "thing". And maybe five pieces of it got eaten. The rest of it, I came to learn, went stale and was tossed out for the crows.
Lesson learned.
