I hate to think...

[333rocky333]

Doing shop fitting we had a whole wall of displays, each prewired and linked with them rubber 3 pin plug in duraplugs, however some muppet fed the wall from the wrong end.
Was not till i unplugged near the middle to repair one, that luckily i noticed.

 

[SUNRAY]

I wasn't so lucky!

About 40 years ago I did the school stage lighting (.....pupils back then were allowed to climb scaffolding and very tall ladders to hang lights and were also allowed - or it had become at least common practice - to maintain & modify the electrical control system, i.e. dimmers).

For one of our bigger productions (a musical, I think) - so large we had to get some 'girls' from the local convent school for relevant roles in the performance - our school hired some extra lighting equipment.

To provide additional wattage capacity the hired-in gear had two mains plugs. These were supposed to be plugged into different rings. And yes - with one plug connected the other plug was live. Very live! I found out the painful way during set up.

I think I just got on with the show with a numb thumb.

Indeed, My senior school had a new building added the year I started. The stage was provided with 5A sockets and cabled back to a position stage right but left in a massive bundle at roof level. some of the teachers added some 4x4 trunking and a junior8 board and 8 tails with 5A plugs. In my 3rd, 4th & 5th years (now year 9, 10, 11) my father did a deal with a local wholesaler and produced a roll of cable, stuffing glands and 5A plugs and i sat there adding in all of the remaining tails, also the woodwork teacher made a wooden switchboard which I wired up and even modified the house wiring (13 chandeliers) to allow them to be controlled from the stage and add dimming. I added sockets to the hall ring final, (dad got a friend to cut and thread conduit). I assisted a metalwork teacher ,working off 15ft stepladders, to add metal in the ceiling void and lighting bars.

The 2 buildings were on different substations and during the power cuts of 1970 or 71 I helped the music teacher throw up a cable between them to bring 30A across to keep the play running, it was terminated in an old unswitched fuse box and 2 leads on 15A fusewire to 13A PLUGS went into extra sockets added to the wooden switchboard. The changeover procedure, in the dark!, was turn off the regular stage lighting isolator, plug the 2 13A plugs in and add the ceramic fuses in the fusebox of course not forgetting to bring all the lights down before adding the fuses!

Before 3rd night I added an additional working light of the fusebox so that area didn't go dark.

50 years on would I let school children do a tiny fraction of that, especially unsupervised as much of mine was?