Swiss story 1: immigration authorities insisted adding my wife's birth name to her official name because "that's how it's done here". 20 years later it's still popping up here and there causing confusion.

Swiss story 2: I was outvoted having an application properly internationalized, they dumped instead all resources in extra database columns because "this country will only ever need three languages". Fast forward, it took one year to get it in resources because somebody high up decided English and Rumantsch wold be needed too and to rewrite all those language-related SQLs turned out overkill.