If you go to Philadelphia and stand at the back (southern end) of the Liberty Bell building (away from the entrance), look across Chestnut street to Independence Hall and up to the second floor on the right you'll be looking at one of the State of Pennsylvania's administrative data centers. The view out the windows into Independence Park is really cool, but I don't think the computers in there appreciate it.
The same can be said for the State of Maryland's Lottery data center, hidden in an historic building in the heart of Annapolis.
And Stan mentioned how much money some companies lose when their computers go down. There is a place in lower Manhattan that is THE clearing house for all transactions on Wall Street. They take an infinitesimally small percentage of the value of the transactions they process daily (in any currency) as their fee for clearing the transactions. They told me once that they were processing around $30 BILLION per minute. Needless to say, they are set up in a mirrored, fault-tolerant environment that never goes down. Even with 911 - They were transferred over to a mirrored data center across the East river in literally seconds and kept running until Pres. Bush halted Wall Street transactions for three days.
Getting back to Larry's problem (remember Larry? He was swapping his CMC Gauges a while back?) : Larry had no slack in the wires going to his gauges.
In a data center it takes a lot of man/woman power and hours to string sometimes hundreds of data cables under the raised floor. The space beneath the floor is typically 2' - 3' deep and in most centers the cables are tossed down there and pulled to the destination and terminated there. We did not string those cables - That was the customer's responsibility.
It takes just as much effort to remove those cables if something changes in the center, because you first have to find which cables are affected and then gingerly drag them back out (risking an interruption), so a lot of (most) centers just clip the ends off and leave them there. You can sometimes see 2' to 3' deep masses of cables down under there from the past 30 years and maybe 15% of what you see is still active, but they're all the same color (usually blue orange or yellow), often unmarked and you can't tell which is which - Just like some CMC Speedsters we've seen!
I bet @DannyP has a few stories like this, too.
Sorry for the drift, Larry. Very quick typing fingers..... 