I once worked on a pulp and paper project in western Canada.

The consulting firm

I worked for was designing the piping for an evaporator set. Evaporators take the
black liquor that is produced in the cooking of the wood fibers (the pulping process)
and evaporate most of the water away, leaving a flammable liquid that can be
burned in boilers to produce steam. The process also recovers most of the chemicals
used in the pulping process.
We had about seven large stainless steel vessels that had nozzles protruding at
all kinds of odd angles. Our piping was designed to attach to these nozzles. The
piping spools had been prefabricated, and due to some problems with the way the
nozzles were fabricated, the contractor was having trouble with the fit-up. The
nozzles had been fabricated out of plate, and when they were rolled the ends were
out of plane. It really was a poorly made fitting, and demanded a lot of grinding to
mate with the adjoining pipe.
The contractor wanted a cost extra to cut off the nozzles and reweld a new
longer length of pipe, which would cause a redesign of our piping.
I was the site engineer and suggested that the contractor cut the nozzle back a
bit so that it would be in the same plane, and then insert a short pup to which the
remainder of my piping could be welded.
You cant do that! Thats against code! No pup length can be less than half of
the pipe diameter.
I didnt have a copy of the code, and I didnt challenge the contractor to cite
the code reference of which he spoke. Had I bothered to ask him the details of the
particular code, I would have learned that he did not know. He couldnt have
known, because there is no such code that prohibits welding a short pup .
Many contractors are code-savvy; many are not. To cite the codes is to speak
with authority. It can be intimidating to challenge someone who appears to stand
on firmer technical ground. But very often when you challenge someone to produce
the code reference, you will find that it does not exist.
Many contractors and engineers have been trained to believe that something is
part of a code when in fact it is not. They were told early in their career that
something is code, or something violates a code. So without consulting the
appropriate code to determine the validity of such a claim, it becomes part of the
prejudices and superstitions that they bring to the job site. In the case of a pipe
fitter, who could blame him for not consulting a code?