I have a similar, but in one way even more insane story, although I was paid more of an employee than a consultant hourly rate. I worked at a big critical infrastructure type company for a good two months and I was supposed to work on-site on intranet-only software. The thing was, the rest of the people in the department were working from home three days a week, I couldn't be "unsupervised" in the building, and it took them almost a whole months to set me up with a VPN. Since my app had to integrate with half a dozen different internal systems, none of which had API specs let alone mock servers, the only thing I could really do from home was was write CSS on mock HTML files. That, combined with waiting like two weeks to get a Visual Studio license approved, meant I spent more than half of my time there at home, doing absolutely no work. The manager fully knew that and I still got paid tho.