When I was hired for my job, it was on a one-year contract, with the expectation of giving me a permanent contract when that expired. That one year recently ran out, making it a good time to ask for a raise. My salary felt good to me, but I did some research and asked friends and apparently it's pretty low. So I figured, okay, when the contract-renewal conversation happens, I'll ask for a 50% increase, hoping to get a 1/3 increase.

It got to a week before my contract expired, and I was still waiting for the contract-renewal talk to happen, and feeling vaguely confused as to why it hadn't; and one of my bosses told me that my new contract was getting held up somewhere in the system because the salary on it was more than a 10% raise, so he and my other boss were having to fight HR to get it for me.

At this point I realised that I probably should have made this talk happen sooner, but now it felt too late (I was probably wrong about that); and I felt very much like an NPC, waiting around for the heros to finish a quest on my behalf that I hadn't even sent them on.

The new contract came a few days later, with a 1/6 raise, which is what I'd considered most likely.