You know its good satire when you gotta think for a minute about whether this was serious or not.
Well if it was real they would have realized the mistake the moment they plugged it in. Since it’s plugged in for the picture, we know they are doing satire
Honestly, if it was plastic & around the block instead of the outlet, then that’ll be a pretty good idea. Plus, we have 3-D printers, so it should be easy
Notice how this pic was taken with flash
Harvard referring to the Harvard hospital, of course.
That’s the joke in the title.
Damn. And I thought I was so clever…
I have to know whether this is a joke or not
It is a joke
Thank you, I’m choosing to believe you for my sanity
The left picture would’ve burned down the house otherwise
Isn’t the socket turned off?
Didn’t even notice that, in my country that doesn’t exist
Hahaha not funny
Every time I see US sockets, I get the heebie jeebies. Or any non-recessed socket really, but at least most add insulation to the base of the prongs. No such luck here.
Meh, that’s only going to “coulda killed you”. The one piece metal wire will create a dead short across the circuit and trip it out instantly. He IS going to need new underwear and possibly pants also. He’ll have some scorched fingers with maybe a bit of temporary tingling in them after pissing off the angry pixies. But as far as death goes, god would need to be looking down directly at him and go “Fuck this guy, right now”. Not impossible, but it would require an exceptional amount of bad luck.
US outlets are safe. Not only does this out show a bit of recess at the surface, but the metal contacts that are carrying the current are also recessed inside about 1/8"/3mm where you can’t see them.
I dropped a penny into the gap between the plug and the socket when I was a toddler. The sparks were FANTASTIC, and long lasting, like a sparkler shooting up the wall.
My dad tried to remove the penny with his metal pliers, my mom stopped him before he killed himself. She yanked the cord and it stopped.
We saved the penny for awhile, might still be somewhere. It burned two trenches in the penny, it almost made it all the way through.
Lessons were learned.
What are you comparing this to? Same in Japan.
Japanese outlets don’t even have a ground pin, only live and neutral. While that’s not a problem on low-voltage or plastic devices, it can be shockingly (haha) dangerous in combination with metal casings.
Probably European Schuko and British outlets, they are WAY better.
I think schuko is much more likely the British ones are not recessed
Yeah, I forgot, thanks for the correction.
Same in Switzerland, the non-recessed ones mustn’t be installed anymore. But just in case devices are plugged into flat ones you also get isolation on the non-earth pins on the new cables
Oh hey it’s a felony tube.
Seems more like a fash light shape
I don’t get it
pipe bomb
“Harry I’ve found the source of ticking sound”
Toothbrush
Hand warmer.
Shocking if true
goddammit heres an upvote
No-one is going to comment on the outlet being installed upside down?
I think the picture is upside down.
FYI: there’s a faction of people who believe this orientation is safer, given that the ground pin is on top (so if a plug is part-way out and something falls behind it, it’ll hit the harmless ground pin instead of the line).
Also FYI: anyone who doesn’t install it like it’s a little surprised face is insane and should be treated as such.
Regardless of the reason and whether it’s justified, this is code for US hospitals, or so I’ve been told.
Pretty common to see if you are in the US at least, builders tend to install a plug backwards if it’s operated by a light switch. Not code or anything, just something they do.
All the outlets in our house were installed upside down, off it wasn’t for bulky transformers that plug directly in & chunky plugs which now have the wire going out upwards, I’m sure it would be a sensible and slightly safer way to do outlets
But bulky transformers are a thing, so there’s that. In any case, what would make the ground on top “slightly safer”?
If the plug is loose and you grab and yank it, there’s no risk of touching the hot, and the ground won’t hurt you. Also, with ground side down, loose outlets expose the hot connection when gravity pulls it down, while this doesn’t happen in the ground up orientation.
I’m not going to say rightside up is unequivocally the “right” way, but I’m not really convinced the things you (and others) are saying is demonstrably safer in any real sense.
If something conductive falls onto the contacts, it’s not bridging anything.
Technology Connections did an episode about why some plugs have holes in the flats. I believe he briefly covered this topic in that video.
Reminds me of the movie where the protagonist Johnny 5 exclaims, “Number 5 is alive!”
one of the dumbest thing i’ve ever seen
Literally the only good thing that could be said about this is that it’s on a brick wall. Otherwise that’s now the 3rd most dangerous electrical outlet I’ve ever seen.
How so? This one instantly trips a circuit breaker and then is quite safe. Now if the two hooks were separate, ir’d be a whole different matter…
Which ones are first and second?
2nd worst: at my friend’s last place the microwave mounted over the stove fell out and he had me come look and fix it and I discovered that the outlet that powered the microwave was strapped to the gas line. No box, just the wires out the end of the conduit wired into the outlet there inside the wall. I told him to get an electrician, I was not touching that shit.
1st worst: basically looked like this.
Wow. You’ve seen things.
The perfect dorm-warming gift:
There’s a type of power cord
You’ll touch the end and see the Lord
And you wouldn’t want that current going through ya
While male on male is usually great
You’ll find yourself in a sorry state
You’ll learn volts jolt but milliamps will kill you
hallelujah etc
You’ll learn volts jolt but milliamps will kill you
The whole volts safe amps kill thing is so stupid though, you can’t have any serious amps without serious volts, unless you have near-zero resistance, which a human body does not.
In fairness the sort of person who needs a song to remind them why male-male mains leads are an idiotic idea probably isn’t going to appreciate Ohm’s Law in any sensible capacity.
I find it similar to “the fall doesn’t hurt, it’s the sudden stop at the end”.
But it’s not entirely accurate, because we can be exposed to thousands of volts. For instant, most ESD are between 2k and 10k volts. Van de Graaff generators can generate up to 1,000,000 volts, yet they are regularly used in school classrooms.
My friend worked in a hardware store for a couple years and he said that around Christmas time you get about a dozen people asking for these.
This tale is old, and I still don’t understand what people try to accomplish with these?! Like, I know hanging like a trillion extenders behind each other is also a way to start a fire, but what are people trying to do with male-to-male cables? I’m at a loss.
They get requested around Christmas time because someone strung their lights the wrong way and now wants to connect the female end of the lights directly to the wall instead of reversing all the lights they just hung.
Oh, I was thinking the holidays were just really depressing for some people, but I like this explanation better.
I always heard they were for powering a house off a generator
There is a kind of person who knows how to do that safely, but that kind of person has already installed an actual load transfer switch to do it the right way.
I still do it, I have a lot of blackouts here, I have to close the breaker, turn on the generator and then every 15 min go downstairs to unplug the gen, and turn on the breaker to know if the electricity came back, I’m cheap but I’m also getting tired of the whole process.
This is what automatic generators are for. They come on after sensing the power drop out and when it comes back on, it shuts down automatically. I have such a system because I live in the middle of a forest and trees fall over sometimes. And for bonus points, it can happen when the outside temps are at -30F/-29C and be off for a few hours or days.
It is expensive, but worth every penny.
I’m going to have solar with island mode soon so I will not invest in a new gen
You have two bus bars in your breaker panel. It is designed to be fed from one main breaker. But, electricity can flow backwards through a circuit.
An interlock kit is a simple device that allows either your main breaker to be turned on, or a different breaker to be turned on. Not both at the same time. With such an interlock in place, you wire the auxiliary breaker to a generator inlet box, so you can plug your house into your generator.
A non-contact voltage detector is the rest of your answer. The detector is locked on, and placed where it can pick up voltage on the main feed into your house: tape it to the main feed into the breaker panel. When power is restored, it starts beeping, and you know you can transfer back.
Do it the right way, because you aren’t the only person who might be doing it, and the people who learn from you might not fully grasp the concepts involved. They might get lazy, skip steps, and set their home and/or generator on fire.
My house has totally fucked-up electrical. For some reason, there’s a secondary breaker box in the basement which switches some of the outlets and lights in the house over to running off the generator outside. So when the line power comes back on, the lights that aren’t switched to the gen come back on (if I happened to have them on when the power went off, at least).
I’ve lived in this house for 15 years now and I’ve been without power here for a total of seven weeks during that time. I like how many trees we have here but that’s the price we pay.
Thats a transfer switch, and that’s exactly what you want here. You want only a few essential loads on the generator, not your entire home. The furnace should be on it, modem and networking equipment, a few outlets for charging phones, refrigerator and deep freeze. Sump pumps.
The electric hot water tank doesn’t need to be on the generator. The welder in the garage. Electric range. Dishwasher, Christmas lights, EV charger, pool heater, spa, or other big appliances that can be done without in an emergency.
That ain’t bad at all.
I’m baffled by people going without power being a somewhat regular thing. I’ve never in my life been without power. I grew up on an old farm, and not once did we lose power. Sometimes lightning would flip the breaker, but never more than that. I realise this is because of the difference in size and infrastructure between my country and USA, but it’s still wild to me, that some people in a rich country actually need a generator. I’ve only ever seen a generator once in my life. It was used at a beach party to power the music.
When you daisy chain christmas lights and just put up 1 of them backwards.
I made one for the little generator at my camp. The idea was to plug the output into an outlet in my homemade shed and power it all, plus energizing an outdoor socket.
Never got around to wiring the shed and it was easier to simply not use the other male end and wire it straight into the outside outlet. Now I can fire up the genny and have a hot outlet outside the shed.
They’re typically used for backup generators
My wife was stringing up lights on the garage wreath and had one strand turned around and wanted me to make one of these to “fix” it so it could plug in. It took a second to explain to her the other end was just going to be an exposed line voltage plug.
Made one of these on accident.
Threw one end of the cord out in the yard and put a new male plug on the other end. Went to plug my saw in and found a male end. Silly me! So I swapped the cord around the threw the other end in the yard. Went to plug my saw in and found a male end. Stood there a minute trying to figure out what the hell was going on.
I’m sure Freud would have something to say about that “mistake”.
OK, that got a literal LOL over here. And that fact I tried to make it work twice!
I did this with sausages on plates once. I’d laid out 2 for me, 2 for my wife. She said she only wanted one, I swapped one of hers for one of mine, but I couldn’t work out why there were still two on each plate. I tried again, same result. Had to take a pause for a sec and and work out what exactly was going wrong 😂
I just recently did the same with a set of patio lights. Was shortening a set of lights which hang over my porch. Measured out the length I needed, cut the cord, attached a new female end. Went to plug the other end in… also female!
Female-female is OK. It’s male-male that’s hot. Know what I mean? Nudge, nudge, wink, wink.
Hillbilly generator hookup. Backfeed hazard.
You see, if the device from the meme was ever plugged in, it’d blow the breaker immediately. This male to male cord, if plugged into two outlets would do nothing.
That’s not always true. If the two outlets are on the same electrical phase, you may be okay. If they are on different phases, it would be dangerous.
Also after plugging one side in, the other side is a fun little cattle prod.
Define fun
Fun for your nipples.
Know anyone withholding information?
you can just cut a normal power cord and have that.
If I’m not mistaken plugging this in to the same outlet won’t do anything. And as far as back feed problems couldn’t you just shut off the the main breaker, i.e. where the power comes into the house?
People usually want them so they can run Christmas lights the wrong way, either because theyve already strung them up backwards or they’re too dumb to figure out a better solution, but the end result if one end is left unplugged is an enormous amount of power just running loose at the exposed end. Even if you just wanted to plug it into the same outlet as a joke, if you plugged one end and touched the prongs on the other end while in the process of plugging the other side in, you’re pretty fucked.
It will either instantly trip the breaker or do absolutely nothing, depending on how it’s wired internally.
The real danger comes from when only one end is plugged in, though. With only one end plugged in, the other end becomes a 120V cattle prod.
They’re illegal and it’s only safe IF the home owner remembers to turn off Mains.
There are legal ones for generators (especially small scale solar stuff) that turn off automatically when they detect no main power on the line, so grid workers can’t get zapped. They are pretty common around here.
Those are called Interconnects, use “Inlets” to hook them up and are not illegal. The suicide cable with two male ends can electrocute the owner and the line workers.
Electricity flows over metal, not through it. As long as there’s an insulator on top, there shouldn’t be an issue.
Would I try it? No.
Could it work? Yes.
Why are all the wires full of expensive metal if we only need the surface?
It depends!
Sometimes wires are stranded–multiple small cores bundled together. This results in greater potential for electricity flow (per amount of copper), and results in greater flexibility of the wire. Most of the cords you deal with on a daily basis are made from stranded copper cable.
But there are cases where solid core is important for other reasons. A solid core wire is stiffer and more difficult to bend, and will typically retain whatever shape it is bent into. But pump electricity through it for decades and it’ll last a lot longer and be more reliable than its stranded counterpart. This is why your house’s wiring typically uses solid core copper–doesn’t move once installed, and reliability is kinda important when it’s inside your walls.
I assume the metal hanger is aluminium. Unless you competely cover the metal in an insulator at the outlet legs then this will short and trip a fuse the second it is plugged in.
Electrical engineer here. You’re mostly right–electricity does mostly flow on the outside of a conductor (a small amount does flow through the core).
But based on this picture, I don’t see an insulator on the hanger wire. Which means it’ll trip a breaker or blow a fuse as soon as you plug it in. And if it’s at your crazy uncle Ned’s house, where he casually replaces his fuses with pennies, you’ll get some visitors in a fancy truck!
Electricity flows over metal, not through it.
I don’t think that’s true, but I don’t know enough about electricity to refute it. electromagnetism, sure, but as long as the metal loops around it’ll pull in the electricity (I believe).
Electrical engineer reporting for duty!
It mostly does use the outside (a smaller amount can run through the core). But your point is correct–if there’s no insultation between the hanger and the contacts, it’ll conduct electricity.
I beleieve it’s true with high frequency electricity, like in speakers, but not at 60hz
Bismuth or Tungsten are very low in electrical conductivity. Coat them in clear rubber and it should be a long while before there’s a short.
