When I am dead, I hope it is said;

I had a similar experience writing for a book. What I found particularly annoying is that I had to mark up everything in the book with their special magical styles, and had to include my image files separately, as well as in the doc. I STRONGLY suspect that the system they were using, that required Word, was using those magical styles to convert the whole thing into TeX. So I am willing to bet that you suffered all of that, because they have a Word to TeX preprosessor that their monkey's are too dumb to know how to skip.