Many years ago..
.. I briefly worked at the corporate arm of a big mobile phone company based in Berkshire.. One day, we decided to clean stuff up around the office.
Upon opening a cupboard, we found an old Novell server humming away (and quite warm!). No-one knew what it was there for (and it didn't seem to have any data on it) so, after letting everyone know about it and waiting a couple of days, we turned it off.
Come month-end, Finance were panicing (even more than usual!) - the billing cycle hadn't completed for the last week or so. After tracing the data flows, we discovered that there was an intermediate server that no-one seemed to know anything about - the sole job that the server did was to take data from one source and copy it to another... and that said server had stopped doing the data copy about a week ago.
The data suspiciously seemed to coincide with when we switched off the old server in the cupboard. So we turned it back on again - and sure enough, after a couple of hours, the billing data started appearing again.
Since the people who had set up the billing process had long since left (they had a *high* staff turnover) we had to get some more people in to fix the billing process so that we could remove the server. It took ages.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
