I wish I could say that was an unusual experience.

It sure is not. I'm not going to list all the examples I know as embarrassing some departments does not end well but I have to share this one. I tried to email someone at the California DMV a couple decades ago. My email bounced and I got a strange routing error. I assumed the problem was on my end. The first thing I did was dig their MX records and what did I get? 2 MX records with RFC1918 address space (10.0/8). I managed to get through to a real person on the phone and that went nowhere. They eventually fixed it some months later but they probably enjoyed the email silence.

Another one involved a 3 letter agency that should know better and could not figure out how to install an intermediate certificate on their website. They expected me to instead install their certificate on all of our servers and got mad & huffy puffy when I refused. I am not naming them but after a couple years they figured it out.