I took down an AS/400 server once by tripping over two Type 1 token ring cables[1] that had been plugged together in the middle of a walkway. No-one ever owned up to that setup.
Oh god, I’d blocked from my mind the pain of ring dropping. We had MAUs for the servers, but for some reason ran the rest of the office on CAT-5 TR gear from Madge without any MAUs. Just took someone to unplug and that section of the office would lose network connectivity.
Possibly the more important question is ‘Why were you running a token ring network in 1999?’! I have no idea why our network was structured like that, this was my first job in the industry and I was a lowly PC tech at the time. If I had to guess, the word that springs to mind is ‘legacy’.
Eh, I was a user on a token ring university network almost that late, and it was superior to the congestion-crippled ethernet networks at more 'advanced' institutions. That said, I definitely didn't enjoy all the practice I got in building token ring-enabled Linux kernels.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IBM_hermaphroditic_connect...