Crazy MLA formatting

I never actually had a professor or teacher tell me anything crazy about MLA citations. I guess I have been lucky in that most of them just referred me to an MLA style guide and said "Make it look like that." On the other hand, as a grad student one of the first things I was told to buy was the MLA style guide and to use it regularly. I now cannot imagine my life without it. I recommend that everyone who is in English or any discipline that has to write a lot of papers go out and purchase this book immediately. It's worth the money.
I did however have a crazy experience with citations at my corporate job. I was working on a website that basically taught doctors which laboratory test to order for a patient and the order to order them in (if that makes sense). I worked on the technical writing side and was responsible for making sure the content was error free and properly cited. Our digital librarian gave me several citations and after I went through them all and formatted them in MLA style, she told me they were wrong. I then went through and formatted them in Chicago style with the Chicago Manual of Style sitting right next to my desk. She then brought them over and told me not only were they still wrong, but I was basically and idiot and isn't this what I did in college?
Needless to say, I don't work there anymore. However, at that point I handed them to her and said, "You do it then." You are using some crazy style that I am not familiar with, so you make them how you want. I don't know what to say in a situation where they want you to use a made up style. It was craptastic (my neologism for the day).
Since then I have been very happy to stick with the logic of the MLA system.
The last few days I have been explaining MLA to many tutees who are in developmental English. It has been interesting to listen to them struggle with the logic of the header and other aspects of MLA citation. However, to avoid the mistake of telling them something incorrect, I say, "Let's look it up to be sure." This allows the tutee to see that the tutor still has to look stuff up and it shows them how to look things up on their own. There is a two-fold value in it.
It was also very interesting to see that many of the style guides contained several mistakes in citation and that to be sure you have to return to the MLA specific style guide. This was good because it let us know as tutors that we cannot always trust things and established the standard for MLA citation.
I was also glad to know that I wasn't crazy when I said that I read that a citation has to be followed by Print. That made me feel better too. I had been doing it and I'm glad it's correct. To hear the reasoning behind it also helped me understand it, which is a good lesson for the tutees. Explaining the reasoning behind something often helps them understand why we do what we do.