Pushing papers around

So this internship I'm taking is about preparing for the working life that comes after university, more particularly, the working life in a publishing company. But interestingly, most things I'm learning have nothing to do with the work itself, but more with the things happening around it, such as 'going to lunch with colleagues', 'having a meeting with people from different backgrounds' and 'interacting with people on cold, stormy Saturday mornings when everybody wants to be in bed but they have to be at some stupid conference they don't want to be at'.
Another thing I'm starting to learn about: office bureaucracy. Today was a case in point, one that drove me almost mad. Now I'm not going to give you any names or specifics, but it's handy to know that the company I intern for is a publisher of educational books, and that they have a lot of their materials online.
Now some time in September, my supervisor got an email from a teacher saying that there were mistakes in one of the answer sheets in the online database, and that she was annoyed by this. She mentioned one specific case, and then said something about 'grammar assignments in the upper levels' also containing mistakes. I removed the mistake from the mentioned exercise and my supervisor emailed back asking the teacher whether she could be a bit more specific about where the other mistakes were. The teacher replied grumpily that she was not planning on telling us.
So about a month after the first email, my supervisor asked me if I could check all (that's right, all) answers for the higher level questions, to see if there were any mistakes. I did this, and emailed her with the mistakes. Then about 2 weeks later she emailed me asking whether I could correct these mistakes. I had thought some specialised author was going to do this, but it turned out I could just do it myself. So I did.
However, there was one question where there was no answer at all, it was simply missing from the answer sheet. I marked this question and send everything back to her, saying that I could not correct this question as I did not know the original author's intentions. She got back to me this morning, saying that the author in question is no longer working for the company (the questions were made in 2007), so I should just do the best I could. So I did, and finally, this afternoon, I was able to email the completely corrected files to IT to be uploaded. A full 3 months after the initial email from the teacher.
I got an immediate reply from our regular IT editor that I should contact another editor, as this was not her area of work. Okay, I thought, just one more email and then I'm done. I resend the email to the second editor, crossed my fingers, and got an immediate reply. Success! I thought. But no, it was an out-of-office reply, stating that the editor would be on holiday until the 2nd of January...
Taking into account the multitude of email this person is going to have after an month's absence, I should be happy if the files are uploaded before my internship finishes. That will be a full 4 months after the teacher initially send her email. All the work I've done on the project could be condensed to about 6 hours. So all the rest of it, the emailing, the waiting, the misunderstandings, the miss-sending, all of that took up the rest of the 4 months.
I'm now starting to see how it is that in such huuuuge companies, stuff always takes longer than you expect. It also makes me less grumpy at our mortgage guy, who delayed our mortgage by 10 days. 10 days is peanuts, I now know, it could easily have been 4 months!