Browsing through tech horror stories reminded me of this little gem I experienced a few years ago. I changed some details to protect the innocent...
I work in a company with somewhere around 150,000 employees. One major regional office needed a new video tele-conferencing setup added to a conference room with about 30 seats. Each seat was to get a flat-panel display embedded in the new conference table with their own computer/keyboard/mouse, and all the standard VTC gadgets like a microphone and a panel full of neat buttons, dials, and headset/speaker jacks so they could listen to simultaneous language translations during conferences. Of course most people nowadays would assume that this could be easily handled by some heavy duty easily maintained rack mounted hardware running a few dozen virtual machines, but that also costs real money. So...
Some bright IT underling figured out they could save around 100 grand up front and at least 10 grand yearly in service charges by buying about 45 dell business class client machines, and stacking them up in a closet off the main conference room. A 6 inch square AC vent was added to the ceiling to keep it "cool" (ahem), and the clients were stacked on their sides, 15 high in 3 stacks floor to ceiling.
Sure enough, the first client to fail was the senior exec's machine. And he'd stored some critical files on the hard drive instead of the network, because senior exec.
And of course, since that computer was the highest priority on initial installation it was the first to be installed, so it was on the bottom of the stack in the back of the closet. I heard it took them almost a week to dig it out and sort out the cables afterwards.
