Another way to have thumb-twiddling fun was for all the machines in a building to reboot - power failure, whatever - and then spend a lot of time waiting for each other's cross-mounted NFS shares to come up.
P.S.
> such as AFS (the Andrew File System)
That one prompted a senior engineer, on learning that it was to be deployed to undergrad's lab machines, to let slip "Why inflict it on the hapless livestock?"