In the late 90's I worked for a REIT in SF, with about 100 employees in the corporate office. Our building in the City was having a planned power outage so we alerted all staff that the building would be shut down and therefore our mail systems and files servers would be down during that period.
I immediately got a call from a VP who insisted that her work continue. I said that we had no control over the situation, and that building was shutting all power down. I explained that we and everyone in the building were in the same boat. She then said in a very clever tone, "well then I guess I will just have to work from home and get my email remotely".
Which then led me to the inevitable question "... how do you plan to do that."
"By dialing into the office with my modem... that much I know how to do" she said.
At that point I contimplated if I should burst her bubble on the phone. I saw no gentle way to explain the problem with her logic. So I said "You bring up an interesting dilemma. Let me send out a notification to that further explains remote access options during this time"
I then sent out an email explaining that although some people have requested if they can dial in during the outage, that remote access during this power outage would also be down. I got a lot of "duh" messages back, and a ticket from the corporate email police for sending out unnessary ALL STAFF emails.. but it was worth it:^0
