My 'favorite' (it seems funnier, with some distance) was when I arrived at a new job as a Research Scientist in a university lab, to execute on a project of a couple PIs... I immediately find out I'm being jammed into this packed, messy, mouse-infested, nest-like office with ~5 grad students (working on other things, not collaborating). With a sense of dread, I sit down at my assigned kidney bean-shaped desk in the middle, someone sits down at their desk that's pushed up against mine... and he's looking at a diagonal of the side/front of my face, from just a few feet away, and seems fine with that.
He's a nice person, and I understand not all people are wired to realize this is a problem for some others, but this is reallocating too many IQ points, away from designing and coding and writing, to social interaction/awareness modes. Plus the other distractions. There was no way I could immerse enough in some of the work, and stay immersed.
(I'm happy to do group brainstorming and problem-solving around a whiteboard, etc., as well as to mentor. But most of my time is spent programming, designing, and writing, which I usually do best solo and focused. Nor do I want to be working all day, every day, almost breathing down each others' necks. For many introverts, and people who like to focus fully on a problem, being packed up against other people is taxing, not energizing.)
In the end, I brought in a laptop from home, and worked every day, cafe-style from the lunch tables in the elevator lobby area of our building floor. Which was suboptimal, but something I could make work. People would come over when necessary, but we weren't sitting on each other's laps. I also got good at quickly cleaning lunch tables without interrupting my thoughts. When my PI renewed my appointment another year, I declined, mainly for a different reason, but the physical work environment made the decision easier.