A few years back, I was assigned to a new team and had to run some analysis on a selection of hardware that kept failing quality checks. Was told this was of the utmost importance to the product and that a future production push hinged on solving this problem. I was given a week. The scope of work would entail at least one really late night into the project.

On Day 5 of 7 (sleepless night happened on Day 2 and 3), a passing engineer from a different team stopped by my desk to chat. Saw my screen and said "neat Python code, what's it all for?"

I replied, "oh it's to do some number crunching on that quality problem."

To which he blandly goes: "Oh. Didn't you hear? We scrapped that entire product line 3 weeks ago."

Reader, I almost actually threw my keyboard off the desk.

(If there was ever an argument for in-office work, it's coworkers telling you to STOP working on something and rescuing you from situations like this...)