Re: The elevator did it
Elevators, micro waves, fridge generators turning on and off, these stories are very common among older geeks.
Explosion danger was one though, at one company, they sent some project guys to a flour mill to work and the client set them up in the main hall, which had a lot of flour dust hanging in the air, as well as causing breathing difficulties, flour dust can be very explosive. The H&S guy wandered through the hall, saw the computers under a direct flour feed pipe and dust coming out of the pipe joints (normal).
He quickly evacuated the project team and had the power to the PCs cut. Luckily, there was no explosion, but the project team were a little white faced, and that was not caused by flour dust!
Another time, I worked for a plastic producer. They had a sulphuric acid store, where tanks of acid were kept. The PC they had was playing up, so I went to look. The motherboard and the drive were both badly corroded. As company policy was no data to be stored locally, I just swapped the PC out.
That was when the user told me the network had stopped working months ago and all the data was local... I managed to recover most of the data off the pitted drive.