Sometimes at work, your boss calls you in, and what seems a relatively routine request quickly spirals out into a realm where common sense takes a backseat and you are expected to perform miracles.
So here goes. The boss wanted to show that a customer complaint was being investigated, so she wanted to use the word "investigation", in the context of "investigations were conducted into the complaint". However, the word "investigations" was plural, and apparently since it was plural and not singular, it reflected badly on the company as it implied that "many investigations" were being conducted into the same complaint, which meant it was probably very serious.
I suggested a grammatical alternative, "an investigation was conducted", but that was quickly rebuffed with "it doesn't have the same effect", apparently because having the word "an" in front, making the sentence grammatical, blunted the action word within the sentence. That option was quickly rejected.
I tried to convince the boss that good grammar indicated a high standard of professionalism which was more favourble than a perception problem, but her argument won the day. She simply went "when you write investigations, the people upstairs will always think that there was a lot of investigations, so it looks bad on your company anyway." Okay, but you can't just take away the "s" in the word and still expect the sentence to work correctly.
The more pertinent point that the rules of English simply forbade a sentence being constructed in such a way held no water because "the impact was lost". The same sentence had to have the word "investigation" without the grammatical article "an", and it also had to be grammatical.
So, the final sentence went like this. "Investigation were conducted into the complaints..."
So, what is the moral of this story? You can't make fried chicken from ducks. If you try to make a duck a chicken, without actually observing rather pertinently that it's a duck, you end up with a fried duck, and no one eats fried ducks for a reason. It tastes like shit, doesn't leave a good impression, and you wasted all the time you spent in the first place trying to fry it into a chicken.
Now, if you had simply tried to braise it, maybe it wouldn't be as awesome as your fried chicken, but you'd still have a good duck. Unfortunately, in some cases, the people upstairs eating fried ducks are willing to accept it as fried chicken because they have no standards, but that's another story.