I worked at a place where I had ready access to a large lot of $1,000 "blade" PC's that I could use for experiments, tests, etc., as needed.

The reason I had them available is that they were supposed to go into a machine that we sold, but since someone in Receiving missed a step in their inspection process, they all had to be marked as Non-Conforming and could not be used in the machine, even though there was absolutely nothing wrong with them. Since they were a special order, the vendor wasn't about to take them back.

So it was either toss tens of thousands of dollars worth of hardware in the dumpster or try to find a use for them internally.