It's the XY Problem Problem. What you describe is exactly why I get annoyed when someone parrots "XY Problem! XY Problem!" in response to a question. Sometimes

It's the XY Problem Problem. What you describe is exactly why I get annoyed when someone parrots "XY Problem! XY Problem!" in response to a question. Sometimes the answer to the question would still be useful for people who need to use it for a different problem. I wish I had saved these examples, but I've seen numerous SO answers where they don't answer the direct question because it's an "XY Problem". Then someone asks the question again, but specific to a problem where it makes sense and ... it's marked as a fucking duplicate of the one that calls it an XY Problem. Instead of marking this as duplicate or calling it an XY Problem, how about you X out Your browser window before we have a Problem? A tangential problem occurs in business. I'll ask someone for some document and they'll reply "I already sent that to you" (contextually this is meant to be snarky - the intent was to demean for being disorganized or whatever). No document attached. Clearly I don't have it, or I wouldn't have asked. It's such a foreign concept to me to not respond with the fucking document even if I wanted to be snarky about having already sent it. The cherry on top is when they say that they already sent it, the document was clearly authored after the time I sent the request, and they don't even bother to apologize.