At my last company we moved into a new building which had a huge flywheel generator thingy on the roof. It was frequently tested, so everyone was under the impression it would do the job if it came to it.
Obviously one day a JCB (or similar) went through some nearby power lines and it was time for emergency power... or it would have been had someone remembered to flip the switch from "testing mode" to "do something when the power goes out mode". Oops.
This didn't effect me as I wasn't in the nice shiny building, but the old building a lot of the company didn't know existed which housed the computers/phone switches etc where we toiled in the basement. Ironically it couldn't be made a machine room down there as "it might flood".
Biting the hand that feeds IT
