Idiots and Electricity
Bear in mind that this happened when I was 19 and surely old enough to know better.

I was walking through a pasture one day when I stumbled across a rusty box nailed to a fencepost with wires running out of it. I immediately recognized it as an electric fence, but also recognized that it was long defunct and abandoned. So I took it with me back to my college dorm room to play with.

I used a screwdriver to remove the rusty housing, revealing a 12 volt battery that had long ago decayed to worthlessness and the deceptively simple workings of the device. I tossed out the battery and poked around inside the thing, and noticed a wire that was loose. I saw where it had been attached previously, so I fired up my soldering iron and re-attached it.

Now what?

Ah! I have a 12 volt transformer that goes to my little tape player. There's even a diagram on it showing the polarity of the plug! Cool! And here I have a paper clip I can bend and jam inside the plug, and a couple of test leads with alligator clips that I can attach to the paper clip and to the outside of the plug, then attach to the battery terminals on the box.

A little wheel thing starts spinning, kinda- it's on a spring so it goes back until the spring pushes it the other way again, and there are contacts that the wheel is opening and closing. Huh. Interesting... Ah, I see it now! It's doing that because it's feeding a transformer to step the voltage up lots, and for that to work you have to have an expanding and collapsing magnetic field- in other words, turning it on and off, which is what opening and closing those contacts is doing! Cool!

At this point I was holding the mechanism in my hands, watching it go boing boing boing. I saw that the wing nut that holds on the wire for the electric fence was loose, so I went to spin it into place with my fingers...

My arms hurt for three days.
( The Resident Loon Not a demographic. Do not measure., Thu 24 Jul 2008, 15:10, 3 replies)

I have a pullstring light in my bathroom that stopped working.
Tut! I shall have to see what the problem is.

We need to turn off the electricity says my daft sister.

Nah! says I. It will be ok, I'll be careful.

I climb the step-ladder, unscrew the plastic fixture and start poking about.

OUCH! Bloody hell, that hurt.

And I'm 43.
( girlinthehole, Thu 24 Jul 2008, 15:20, closed)

Well, you have an excuse
as you're not an engineer, nor had you (at that point) been mucking about with electricity for years. I had studied electronics and had helped wire a house, so I knew what I was doing. And yet I did it anyway...

feh.
( The Resident Loon Not a demographic. Do not measure., Thu 24 Jul 2008, 15:31, closed)

Click
Have a click for those aching arms.
(morrigan456 made sex wee on, Thu 24 Jul 2008, 16:57, closed)