For work once I had to get a document legalised by the Angolan embassy. Turns out that this is a service that is only available by turning up in person during one two hour window a week. They won’t even answer the phone outside of that time.
I asked around and somebody knew a man called Rupert who used to work at the Foreign Office who could get these things done for a small fee, but for a while it looked like I was actually going to have to traipse to the Angolan embassy from Cambridge to get the stupid thing done.