My supervisor appears to be engaged in some malicious compliance.
Our company has a Shanghai branch. Sometimes if the Shanghai branch can't handle a translation case, for example they don't have enough manpower or the deadline is too tight, they'll pass it over to us at the Taipei branch. We'll ask them when the deadline is, and take the case if we can.
Unfortunately, there's a project manager over at the Shanghai branch who always wants cases handed in before the deadline if possible, and will harangue the PMs over here in the Taipei branch, asking for updates on the case and requesting the case to be completed early if possible. This creates problems for my supervisor, because she arranges our caseloads based on the deadlines and wordcounts she has on paper. In other words, if a case has a deadline of 5pm today, but the Shanghai PM actually wants it at noon, then the translator and/or editor might need to sacrifice some of their cases in the morning in order to complete this particular case by noon, despite it having a deadline of 5pm.
My supervisor has apparently been trying to remind the Shanghai PM to give firm deadlines. Today we got a case passed over to us, and I was tasked with completing it. It's a tiny case, one that would literally take me 2 minutes to do. The deadline given by the Shanghai PM was 6pm today, but the PM literally started asking for updates on the case at 10am, and approximately once every hour after that. So my supervisor told me that since 6pm was the deadline set by the Shanghai PM, then 6pm is when we'll hand in the case.
I was all like, "Yes, ma'am, I will browse Reddit until 5:58 this afternoon!"