Similar but not entirely different..
At a facility about 800 miles away, that we support remotely, the big UPS died. A manager with access decided it would be best to shut down the facility before a major storm and when the UPS was powered up again... well, it didn't. So the quick-thinking office manager gathered every power strip she could find and plugged all equipment in their small server room into 4 power strips, going to all 4 wall outlets in the room. And it held until I made a trip down there a month later.
One thing she didn't know is that 3 of the 4 outlets in the room were daisy chained on once circuit. When I found the breaker, it was noticeably warm, but holding. She had somehow hit the magic combo by sheer luck--if she had put all the switchgear on the same circuit as the servers, the POE providing current to all the phones and cameras would have surely popped that breaker. As it was, the power strip was also comfortably warm and its internal breaker was probably barely hanging on by its electronic fingernails.
As it was going to take several months at best for the PO to be cut, the purchase made, the new UPS sourced, and then installed by a local electrician, I purchased 2 fairly beefy consumer-grade off the shelf units, suitable for a well-endowed home office, and balanced the load as best I could between them. The transformer box for the old dead UPS was still good so I was able to connect these to it and not use the wall outlets. Some months later they didn't have the new UPS yet and were experiencing some power problems again.
Diagnosing the problem over the phone with the office manager and the photos she sent, I finally discovered that some exec visiting from corporate had complained about how messy the server room was so after hours some of the staff decided to neaten up all the wiring. they had taken my interim solution and had one UPS plugged into the other now, with most of the load on it, and some back plugged into a wall outlet again "because it was more tidy."