"Jethro_uk" wrote in message
...
On Tue, 30 Mar 2021 16:34:17 +0100, Brian Gaff \(Sofa\) wrote:

I'm always wary of so called safety devices that rely on electronics.
That is why I used to pull out the breaker on that circuit completely.
OK some bodger might have routed a live from a different ring, but very
unlikely.

Electrician we had in to *quickly* do a fix in order to allow me to
decorate made a point of taking the fuse out of the fusebox and putting
it in his pocket.

He was in his 50s and said as an apprentice, someone he worked with
removed a fuse to work on a circuit in a factory or warehouse. Sadly
someone came along, saw the open fusebox and removed fuse and put it back
and closed it.

My mum had a friend who had a son a few years younger than me. When Mark was
about three, he happened to be passing the fuse box in the under-stairs
cupboard and "helpfully" turned on the main switch that the electrician had
turned off while he was working on a circuit. The electrician (who lived at
the house which backed onto ours) survived unscathed, but he was not best
pleased!

As an aside, mum's friend used to complain that if I was left alone at her
house when I was little, I'd get up to mischief - pouring salt into the
sugar bowl, screwing up (literally!) the tension on her sewing machine,
spilling her perfume on the dressing table taking the varnish off the wood,
etc. Then when her son got to the age I'd been, *he* started with pranks - I
know he put a stick in her twin-tub washing machine, jammed the paddle and
therefore the motor and caused smoke to come out of the machine; and there
were many other things. So she had to admit that it was not just me but
"all" boys who got into mischief at that age. The one that took longest to
diagnose and fix was probably a genuine accident: he was playing in their
car and accidentally dislodged a wire under the dashboard with his foot
(though no-one knew that at the time), causing half the electrics to fail -
not irreparably, but until the wire was found where a plug and socket had
been pulled apart.

Now tell me that girls *never* do that, ever ;-)