On my university's campus, the CS department has its own high-rise. The building is okay, but being built in the Seventies it's not made for today's CS lectures where 50% of the students immediately get out their notebooks and play poker online. There just aren't enough wall outlets.
About two years ago the Powers That Be decided to do something about it and set things in motion for a new CS building. Apparently they misunderstood "Computer Science", though, because the final result was a fine example of how computers don't always make things better.
The entire building is automated. Well, mostly. Some parts aren't, thank $DEITY. In the automated parts we have moved past things like light switches. If you want to turn on the light you have to get out your notebook, connect to the WLAN, log into the VPN, access the web interface for the room you want, enter username and password and finally turn on the light in the interface. Wow, that sure is convenient.
Note that it's impossible to turn on the light in a room you don't have the right credentials for. It is, however, possible to play with the lights in a room you aren't in if you do have the right credentials. Especially useful when someone tries to do some work in there.
The corridor doors in the building are also hooked up to a central server. Without a keycard you're not getting far. Bad if you want to talk to someone and his office is inside a locked area; especially as there are no doorbells unlike in other buildings on campus. Also bad when a steam pipe in the basement bursts and kills the authorization server. Guess what happened less than one year after the thing was built.
Oh, the windows are tied to a web interface, as well. Very popular amongst those who just visit for lectures, especially in summer.
The building was built around the concept of having tablet PCs on the walls everywhere. Those tablets would have access to the local web interface and offer navigation, location and communication services. Now, that kind of thing is pretty expensive so the Powers That Be decided to turn it into a student project (let's call it "SmartBuilding") instead. SmartBuilding would be a two-year CS project - doing one such project is mandatory for CS students so they'd have the students learn something and get their software for free. Hooray!
Well, SmartBuilding ran into a little problem: When the building was planned the architect apparently wasn't told about the tablet PCs that would be hanging everywhere. As a result there simply weren't enough outlets to plug in the tablets. Somewhat bad for a building that was planned around that very feature. SmartBuilding had to scrap the original plan and refocus; the "smart" building itself remains a mess of unopenable doors, unswitchable lights and windows that open and close by themselves because someone thinks it's funny to annoy people via the web interface.
Those are just the computer-related WTFs in there. There are others, like putting two student projects in one room wth a very high ceiling which generates so much hall that rarely more than one of the projects uses the room at the same time, even though there would be enough space. And to top it off, the whole thing looks suspiciously like a huge brick - even the 70s-era high-rise still used by most CS people looks downright beautiful in comparison.
I'm very happy my project sits in a building on the other side of the campus.