Shocked While Playing With an Electrical Outlet

Writen By:  Andrew Eide

Our father was an electrician working for the City of Oakland. We watched our father do all the electrical stuff around our house including building a 2^nd floor on our home to transform it from a single floor home to a two story home.

One day I was sitting on our back porch looking at the electrical outlet. Sitting on a table next to the electrical outlet was a telephone set but it wasn’t in use it was just sitting there. I looked at the wires coming out of the phone and I noticed that there were metal eyelets crimped onto the wires. The colors of the wires were Black, Red, White, and Green. Even though I was maybe 4 or 5 years old at the time I knew that the Black and White are usually the hot wires while the Red and Green serve other functions with the green often being the ground wire.

I wasn’t overly concerned as I stuck the eyelets into the slots of the electrical outlet since there was insulation on the wires. Of course my level of comprehension at that age didn’t allow me to notice that from where the eyelet was crimped onto the bare wire there was about ¼ inch of bare wire before the insulation started.

Since the Black wire is usually the hot wire I stuck the metal eyelet of that wire into the slot. I then rotated sticking the metal eyelets of the other colored wires into the other slot knowing that would complete a circuit and something would happen even though I had no clue what would happen.

Sometimes nothing would happen. Once time I heard the sound of a busy signal on the receiver. Another time when I stuck the metal eyelet into the slot on the electrical outlet the phone’s bell would ring. I was thrilled that at my young age I was able to do something like this. It was like magic to me.

Then I got overly excited and was quickly transferring the other colored wires to hear the various items sound off on the phone. I didn’t realize that on the Black wire I was touching the bare wire. So when I inserted one of the other colored wires into the other slot, and I was also touching the bare part of the wire, that I was completing an electrical circuit through my body.

When that shot of electricity hit me I went off instead of the phone going off. I don’t remember much about the shocking incident but I do remember regaining consciousness and I was about 5 to 6 feet away from the electrical outlet. That means the electric shot threw me across the back porch. Lucky for me I got thrown as the main cause of death with electricity is that your muscled contract and you cannot let go of the hot wires that are shocking you. Being thrown saved my life as it disconnected me from the electrical outlet.

A shocking experience that I never tried to recreate again during the rest of my life.