Truthfully, my day job is a real pain, and it's mostly boring that I don't like to think too much about it (much less talk about it afterwards) when I'm not at my job, so most of my friends do not know what I do for a living. That's fine with me. If I tried to explain it to them, I'd be as bored telling them as they would be bored listening, so it really works out this way.
But this situation today was slightly amusing, so it's worth sharing (in vague terms since I don't want to sidetrack myself with too many details).
Basically, we receive a request (work) and we have to complete the transaction requested, and then it goes to a department where they approve the work (humorously titled "quality assurance"). If we get a difficult item, we can ask for guidance with the work from Service Admins, i.e. consult an elevated peer, so today, I had a very hard, complex transaction and I asked an elevated peer how to process it around 11AM.
This complex transaction takes a long time to process, but I had a very specific question at the end of the process, and I asked about that specific part but they said that, in this case, I wouldn't have to do it the long, hard way, because there is a simple alternative where it updates easily. So I undid all the work I had done and updated the transaction through easy, simple way.
After I processed it the easy way, I sent it to have my work double-checked. The people that double-check my work actually said, "no, this is a long, hard transaction, and what you've done is very easy, so it must be wrong."
My alternative course of action was to argue, and they basically told me, "yes, that was an easy way to do it, and it may seem shorter, but you need us to approve it and we won't, so your supporting the easy way with rational explanations will take longer than the long, hard way, because we are going to argue, and you will have to use the long, hard way anyway."
Honestly it reminded me of an observation I made during the 2008 elections: "Some people are so full of their own shit, they don't know life without it."
