Reallywittyname reminds me (seems to be doing a lot of that recently...)
When I was little, I used to play with motors, batteries and the like a lot. I had just learnt that the speed of the motor was governed by, amongst other things, the voltage applied to it (yes, that young). I had this one motor from a toy airboat, with a fan attached, and it just wasn't producing enough wind for my liking (IIRC I was trying to move a mobile on my ceiling with it on the ground).

"I know", I thought, a 9 volt cell will make it go quicker than these two lowly 1.5 volt cells. And it did, but still not enough.

"I know", I thought, I'll wire it up to the socket. 240v should really do the trick. I held the two bits of wire to the motor, one with each hand, and slowly moved the wire towards the socket, carefully making each wire go into either side of the socket...

Nothing. Closer inspection of the socket revealed two little pieces of plastic just inside the live and neutral holes. Bugger. "So how does a plug fit?" I wondered. Cue some experiments and I find that the odd-shaped bit of plastic in the earth hole pushed the guards in the other holes down and out of the way. "That'll be why the earth pin is longer" I smugly guessed, "to push the guard out of the way before those two pins get to it".

"I know" I thought, holding the two bits of bare-ended wire over the holes, one over each, as I inserted plug to hold them in place. Perfect. Now all I had to do was squeeze the other ends together onto the contact of my motor an... BANG!

Next thing I know was being on the other side of the room. I went back to inspect the damage and found two badly melted pieces of wire which I hastily hid. I'm still not sure to this day which of several things saved my life. Was it: the fact that I had used one hand to complete the circuit, rather than two which would have created a path across my heart? The fact that the wire was extremely thin and crappy and burned through like a slow-blow fuse? Sheer luck? I think probably a little of all three.
(misanthrope is so adjective he's verbing nouns!, Thu 20 Dec 2007, 17:31, Reply)