The company in question had a rather large on site server room (raised floor, fire suppression) and a massive generator to deal with any power issues as well as redundant connectivity. This room was literally the backup incase their "real" data center went off line.

The problem is that the room was "convenient" so there were plenty of things that lived ONLY there (mistake one) -

When the substation for the office went, and the generator started everything looked fine. The problem was that no one had ever run the generator for that long... after a few hours it simply crapped out (over heated, problem two).

A quick trip to home depot got them generators and extension cords that let them get the few boxes that were critical back up - however one box decided to not only fault, but to take it's data with it.

This is when I got a rather frantic call "did I still have the code from the project I did?" - they offered to cut me a check for $2000 if I would go home right then and simply LOOK for it.

Lucky for them I had it - and the continuity portion of the DR plan got revisited.

In hind sight after I said I had the code, I probably could have asked them to put another zero on the end of the check and they would have done it just to be a functioning business come 6am.