(Not me, but someone I worked with) My first job out of school, working away from home and learning the ropes of embedded software. The office was using on pr

(Not me, but someone I worked with) My first job out of school, working away from home and learning the ropes of embedded software. The office was using on promise databases, email servers and the like, as was somewhat common at the time, but nothing much more than a a few robustified PCs and some networking infra. We were having internet problems being too far away from the exchange and so the telephone company was coming into replace the exchange over the weekend so everything was shutdown on the Friday night. Monday morning comes by and we boot things up again, but no connectivity… Office is dissolving into chaos as phones were also down. British Telecom is demanded to return this very minute and figure it out! An hour later a very flustered gentleman turns up and begins to debug a few sockets but finds them all dead. 1 minute later he is at the new exchange (that was inside our office), only to emerge from the room after 30 seconds looking extremely confused. It turns out Dave, an extremely helpful chap who was in charge of some product final assembly had turned up at the office as normal at 7am and thought he would helpfully uninstall the old exchange and throw it in the skip we had rented for just that purpose. A quick wonder around to said skip found the exchange in there with a bunch of wiring - the helpful chap had really gone to town on this. Sadly, I was quick to identify that this was the new exchange, not the old by observing simply how fresh it looked and the BT chap came over to confirm. Because of the damage that had done to the wiring, it was not trivial to simply wire back the old exchange and so that was the end of office operations for a week. A small company meeting was held where it was announced that “an error of judgement” had occurred and that we were to have some vacation - much of the in office equipment was taken offsite to get temporary connectivity so that sales could continue whilst we vacationed. Internet remained terrible until I left that gig, now blamed on all the wire patches needed to get the office back on line.