These computer support stories reminded me of one that happened a few years ago at my old job.
We* needed to get a new server - a not inconsiderable server. $3M worth of specialised server. Only one company, MegaComputerCorp, makes them. But we work in a government department, and there are procurement rules that need to be followed, so we had to go out to tender for the hardware.
That would have been simple enough, however the rules also stipulated that for capital expenditure of that degree, we must also have a project team that manage the tendering, purchase and installation of said hardware. So the procurement department establish their project team, who go about their business at their usual glacial pace. Some twelve months or so after the process started, we have the new server. Yay!
Until they went to install it. You see the project team had neglected to establish if the location of the new server was ready to go. Well, there was space, but no dedicated power supply to power up the new megabeast. And now, since the project had swallowed all the funding for the new server (what with paying the project team of three people for twelve months), there was nothing left in the bucket to establish the power supply. It took another three months to get the power supply issue sorted, and the server up and running. I'm still not sure where they got the extra bucks from.
I suppose we should consider ourselves lucky we actually got the server we needed, because they did try to persuade us otherwise in the beginning.
* 'We' as in my work unit. We owned and managed the previous server, which contained statewide data storage and financial information for our Govt Dept. It was an older version of the new server, which was slow, having space issues and was beyond its use-by date.