Bureaucracy...Frustration

I live in a ridiculous place where, on the surface, there appears to be no rules and yet when you dig a little deeper you see that your life is completely controlled by them.

The story...my friend's parents are/were coming here to see us for Christmas. After weeks of work trying to get their visa (they don't really like to give American visas around here), they finally got word that they had received an approval number. However, conveniently, her mom's paper got 'lost' and no, they couldn't just print out another paper with the same number, they had to start all over again for her. So at the last minute they finally get it all worked out and then my friend had to take the papers to our airport to make sure that the airport in Turkey knew that they had the proper paperwork. (again, they like to make life pretty much as needlessly complicated as they can). My friend gets to the airport with all of the required paperwork and the man says 'sorry, we're not letting Americans in today'. Although I didn't get a play-by-play on the conversation, let's just imagine how it probably went.

'We have all of the paperwork from downtown, they have approval numbers...'
'Good...but we're not letting them in'
'Even though we have the approval from downtown? I have the paper right here'
'nuh-huh'
'so, you're just not letting Americans in today?'
'Nope'
'But their plane actually comes in tomorrow. Will you let Americans in tomorrow?'
'We would have to process the papers today and we're not processing American papers today'
'Will you be letting them in tomorrow?'
'Insha'allah (if it's God's will)'
'How can it be insha'allah? Either you process the papers today or you don't?'
'Insha'allah'
'But they have to get on the airplane today and so we need to know if you will let them in'
'Malesh' (the all encompassing Arabic word for too bad for you, not my problem, etc)

Their parents were supposed to arrive tonight but they couldn't get on the plane because the guy at the airport decided that he just wasn't going to do that, even though the official offices downtown have issued them permission to come in. You would think that the high up, in charge guy gets the final say on who comes and goes...turns out it's the little guy who sits behind the desk, he has a surprising amount of power. Lift us up!