i used to do contract consultancy work, and the guy who ran the company i was working for, his wife ran a legal company, and they had just got in some win98 machines from a PC box shifter but were having trouble. so he asked if i could go have a look (still paid for my time from his company), and give him a run down of what the issues were.
after getting over my initial shock of the amount of fit muff working there, and trying hard not to step on my own tounge. it transpired that the win98 machines (this was about 3 years ago) wern't talking on the network. why? an ageing novel server that one of the seniour partners might as well have picked up at a car boot sale was the main database server, and the network infrastructure was... BNC! oh my god!
spend the next two days patching win98 to run with novel, switching 98 to not send encrypted passwords or scrambled IP packets, and changing the PINK colour config the girls had setup to something not so visually violent so they didn't get eyestrain...
but yeah, basicly it was setup by one of the senior partners as a common conception at the moment is that IT is just about plugging things in.
wrote in my report the various upgrades. spent alot of time playing with cables under desks... (i'm not a leg man really i'm not).
but yeah, after the dotcom boom, alot of companies arn't investing in the people to sort all this out, and are suffering in the process..