Your experience with "Enterprise Architects"?

Today was my first time interacting with an Enterprise Architect. He entirely lived up to the negative EA stereotypes. At my work we deal with another company regularly. They are fairly large but nothing they do is complex. It's just a few web sites, some eCommerce, and some corp. infrastructure.

We need a web service method to verify that a username and password were valid or not. This resulted in a meeting with their newly appointed EA. He told us it would take a week, or a week and a half to get it done, because he had to talk to the developers "make a design, and make sure things done more formally, because these guys typically just start coding, we need them to have a more methodical process." This would take me 30-45 minutes from start to deploy.

I picture this guy going off to his developers and having a design and architecture meeting to plan out this single method. I'm picturing a UML diagram. Oh shit, you also made a diagram about how this is going to use a 3-tiered architecture!? Good one, buddy! You really put Visio through its paces today!

This is not banking, or something that needs compliance checks. The database already exists, the accounts are already there, the passwords are already hashed, and no data is being created or modified. We just want them to tell us if the combo passed in is valid.

After 4+ years of the projects being run by him they are still stuck in this world where they don't even have the basics done, no automated tests, no automated builds. The offshore dev's log into the development environment's web server. You know why? Because Visual Studio is installed there, and they all do development from that machine. There are many different copies of the main web project there, and only one person knows which one is the "real" one. It's definitely not one of the ones that have "real version" as part of the folder name. I tried all of those.

Any similar experiences? Any advice on dealing with this type of architect?