I'm sure everyone of us has many opportunities in their professional and personal lives to interact with people who tend to focus on the irrelevant. The old saying "making a mountain out of a molehill" is unfortunately still valid. In my work especially, I deal with mostly adminstrative medical evaluations for employment and it seems to be a near daily occurrence that someone in the process will decide to focus on a point that is trivial to everyone else in the world (except them) to the exclusion of the truly important issues at hand. In my line of work, it's often more trouble to put someone in their place as opposed to just patting their hand until they go away and dump their molehill on someone else.
On a related subject, it's painful yet sometimes fascinating that you will get patients who are much more concerned about some administrative aspect to their exam as opposed to the fact that you are telling them they need to change their lifestyle or they're going to die before their 60. The typical response you get is something along the lines of "Ok, I realize that I'm overweight, hypertensive, diabetic and at imminent risk for a fatal heart attack in the next five years if I don't stop smoking, overeating, drinking, not exercising, etc. But is this going to keep me from working overtime this weekend? Because I really need to pay for that new bass boat." Not to mention people who get upset because it's such an inconvenience for them to come into the clinic once a year for 2-3 hours to have an exam that is a condition of their continued employment. Most of them don't consider that their health should be more important to them than it is to us, but that's usually not the case. The unspoken but very common philosophy is work until you die, even if you could extend your life by twenty or thirty years with a few lifestyle choices.