Rich, I feel your pain.
Sometimes our ability to set forth technical issues clearly is totally overpowered by the recipient's ability to confuse them and totally misunderstand them. Just like Alice's Restaurant, we can have the case really together--all the glossy 8" X 10's and whatnot, and discover too late that the judge is blind!
I once acquired a small sheet of brass that was needed for a memorial plaque to be attached to a project, but I needed it sheared. It was large enough for two plaques, but the BOCES-fresh guy that tried to perform the task in the shop made his first cut so that the material yielded exactly
no usable pieces.