I had a similar situation. My employer decided to run a NL HE tourney. I told the organizer that I had experience doing tourneys and wanted to help run it. They kept refusing. The tourney started. I started explaining to the people on my end of the room the standard chip colors (red = 5, green = 25, etc.) and that we should probably start with T1000 chips. The organizers didn't care, and thought T1000 was way too many chips. So they just randomly selected a starting amount of chips and started randomly raising blinds.

They started breaking all sorts of rules. Someone couldn't be there for the first hour. Instead of blinding him off, they let him come in the second hour with a full stack of chips. When we got down to the final 7, I said we have to start the final table with the number of chips we had when at 2-tables. The people at the other table said they were dipping into the chip bank the whole time, so we had to start over with the same chip stacks we started with.

Would have been frustrating as hell if I didn't win the tourney.