More gis follies, but this could go in the triumph thread also. We had work in an unfamiliar county, and needed contours for a site plan. County website didn't appear to have the easy to use arcgis, but they did have downloadable datasets, and I had my old nemesis qgis...
Contours were in individual .zips with a staggeringly small grid. You could view the grid on a pdf, but I couldn't see the pdf and gis data at the same time. So... A few trial/error download/imports later, and I found the right contour grid. Get it on the screen, but can't figure out how to export what I'm seeing to a usable format. Draftsman tells me he can use an image, any image, but he prefers tif or pdf. So I take a png screenshot, bring it into gimp, then export it as a tif. I get some complaints about the light blue not showing up well, so I look into making the lines dark in gimp. But get waved off. Turns out he can see it ok. He imports the pic, lines up the rights of way, and... the contours look fucked up. There's a big hole in the house...
He asks me if I can get the houses on gis, so I grab those from the site, and go to import them, but find my boss was fucking with my computer, and messed up the window. I can't find where to import the dataset, so I drag/drop the shapefile like a neanderthal, get the house in the picture, and repeat the screenshot/gimp routine, but this time exporting as a pdf. He brings that in, lines the house up with what we shot, and it looks great. The hole's out of the house, and in the pool :^D
So, I had the most retarded workflow that would have left Rube Goldberg thinking "Seriously? Was all that necessary?!", But I got the data needed, and I doubt anyone else would have been able to. I got a refund on the hours spent fucking with qgis over the last year or so.