Over the summer I worked as an intern at a fairly large company. This was my first job at a large office-type job, and the bureaucracy that was in place there would have been very sad and disillusioning had I not been prepared for it by my dad’s stories (he’s worked there longer than I’ve been alive).
While I’d encountered some of the maneuvering at other places, this was on a completely different level.
Here is my favorite story:
I worked in a smaller tech support department dedicated to one specific branch of the company that had specialized needs. The corporate IT department did not like having another group with access to “their” network, and so would, on occasion, pull something stupid.
All our servers and equipment were located in different, separate LOCKED locations, well away from any corporate equipment, with the exception of a few key places, where they would have maybe one rack of things. One day a couple of guys in our department were finishing up a call near one of these rooms, and saw a maintenance guy… replacing the lock on our closet. 
So they head back upstairs and ask the boss: “Were we getting the locks changed?” “NO!!!” Boss storms off, breathing fire and with smoke pouring out of his ears. Turns out corporate IT had put in a work request to have all their locks changed over, and included ours just for fun. I could pass it off as just a minor oversight, but when we told them about it, not only did they refuse to change our locks back, but they also refused to at least give us a key so we could GET TO OUR OWN EQUIPMENT. This went on for about a week, with more and more locks turning up changed, even in locations that should have never been on a corporate list to begin with. We laughed, watched our boss flip out several more times, and finally got access to our own rooms back in fairly short order. (This process sped up when my boss complained… LOUDLY… to the corporate boss who’s office just happened to be across from a friendly provost. Things moved quickly after that, and thankfully no hardware crashed or needed work during that period.)
We thought that was the end of it, until about a month later, when maintenance men were found around the door of another room…
Does anyone else have tales of corporate politics taking a truly stupid turn?