This is what happens when one tries to carry an old-school full tower case without taking proper precautions. The offending article was Known as Marvin and had a Cthulu painted on one side.
It's not been my week. The old Compaq Proliant 1600 (Dual PII-400 and a 5x9.1GB SCSI raid array) came back for fixing. Having found a replacement for the dud disk and re-built the array, one of the processor slots decides to give up the ghost and the power switch decides not to.