I had a similar situation that I use to explain corporate stupidity. Not documentation per se, but the same kind of thing. Company I used to work for (I stress USED TO WORK because this example is one of many that forced me to look elsewhere) Anyway, we had a database for our data center that had the machines, serial#s exact locations etc of every machine in our data center, several thousand servers in all. We could go to that dbase and lookup a server and it would show us what room, Row, Rack and exact location IN that rack so we could find our servers to work on them. It was effing beautiful. Took about 5 years to accumulate that in formation and it worked amazingly well.
Then we were bought out by another larger company. They came in and saw how we had our data center setup and since we had such nice racks and were setup so well, we made them look bad. (They had all of their servers stacked up one on top of another 10 high with no racks and all sitting on those metal shelf systems like you would see in a tire warehouse. I kid you not!
Since it looked bad to have our data center look so much more professional than theirs, one weekend they had one of the maintenance men (Who had ZERO business being in our datacenter in the first place) go in after hours and remove all of the doors from the servers and THROW THEM AWAY. That way it at least LOOKED more like their setup did. Problem is that all of the labels that were used to locate the machines were on those doors so in less than a day they had destroyed the dbase that we had taken years to complete.
And let me tell you, finding servers from that day on was a nightmare. I quit not long after that mess.. When they removed all of the high speed fibre we had run and replaced it with the older slower fibre they were using. Yeah, I was out of there. <smh>
