There are times when someone else is making e.g. the design decisions, the schedule decisions, etc. Let's take schedule: They want to know when I'll be done with something. But I have 5, 8, however many dependencies, half of whom are not responding to my queries for information and several of whom are outside of my team and immediate reporting structure.

What do I need? Responses so that I can determine my own schedule. What do I get? "Just tell me when you'll be done."

Well, Mr/Ms project manager, what do you really need to be doing? Getting answers from the dependencies who are refusing to answer me. But that's difficult and frustrating and time consuming. So you just lean on me, because I'm on your team and at hand.

More frustrating than schedules are specifications. I'll do some QA work. In order to have some idea of the effort, I need to know the specifications. But those are still in (major) flux (despite being 2/3 of the way through the budgeted schedule). I attempt to explain this. I start describing detail because the person I'm talking to has no idea of the scope of impact this lack of definition creates, or perhaps even that there is still a lack of definition and what that is. But they just want a date, and/or a number of hours.

I'm delving into detail because they haven't done their job. But they don't want to understand the impact of their lapse. They just want "the solution".

Not that I don't make mistakes, myself, and sometimes fail to deliver. But I try not to blow people off because they are finding what they are tackling to be complex.

I guess my comment has ended up being very work focused. Similar things happen in personal life. I started to describe an example, but I think I've written enough.