Forum Overview :: Tansin A. Darcos's Alter Ego

On the leading or trailing edge of a brush-pass with death by Commander Tansin A. Darcos 05/10/2013, 12:44pm PDT Tell me, do you recognize the small silver object next to what is clearly a 1979 penny? (Yeah, this web cam's resolution is pretty good!) If not, let's try a couple more pictures: This is one of the prongs of the plug off a Vivitar TS-120 AA/AAA battery charger manufactured by Sakar International, or as I like to refer to the poor bastards, I mean customers, like myself, who buy their merchandise, Sucker International. (You can probably guess I've had trouble with their stuff before.) Would you like to guess where it broke? Well, if you guessed "while stuck in the wall socket" you're right! Which means that if anyone brushes past that exposed piece of metal, depending on conditions, could get a shock or worse. So I've got to get it out. I have a long grip device, has rubber feet and is excellent for picking up things. But it can't get a grip on this. I try some sticky address labels, they seem to stick to anything. But not to the piece of steel. I don't have anything around I can pull it out with. I will not, under any circumstances, touch it with any part of my body no matter how insulated, even with rubber gloves, I will not take any chances. I can't get to the circuit breakers, I can't reach them and no way to check which is the correct one, can't turn everything off, need some way to make sure we just shut off this socket. So, it's stuck, dangerously exposed, sticking out of the wall socket. Until I notice the tiny little hole in the middle, and I can get the point of a rubber-coated plastic pen into the smaller hole. Then push to the side and POP! out it comes. As I understand it, electrical charges are tested for polarity when the charge rises or falls on the sine curve of the 60hz wave of electricity, either before the top of the curve (the leading edge) or after (the trailing edge). I believe one plug is "hot" and the other is "ground." So if it's on the wrong one, you touch it, you're grounded by touching the ground and you're not insulated, you die!. So now you get where I got the title for this posting. Yeah, I'm in a wheelchair on rubber tires, I am not grounded could probably pull it out even with my bare hand, the way a bird can land on a high-voltage electrical wire, but I won't take that chance; I won't even take it if I am wearing rubber gloves or are otherwise insulated. This incident is why that I do not think I want to buy anything made by Sakar International again. Now, their Vivitar video cameras aren't too bad, they are often not too expensive, do pretty good video with sound and can take snapshots too. Note that the webcam I used to take these snapshots is not a Sakar-made or Vivitar-branded product, it's from Gigaware.

On the leading or trailing edge of a brush-pass with death by Commander Tansin A. Darcos 05/10/2013, 12:44pm PDT