More wiring follies..
A friend of mine bought a house, and she asked me to take a look as every time she plugged in her computer monitor (CRT type) into a certain outlet, the circuit breaker would trip instantly. The monitor worked fine when plugged into any other outlet, and anything else plugged into the suspect outlet worked fine too.
The outlet was a standard 3-wire duplex outlet, like billions of others in the US. The house was somewhat older and parts of it still had 2-prong outlets. Upon pulling the outlet out of the wall, I found that to make this a 3-wire outlet, someone had wired the neutral and ground together, as there were only 2 conductors available from the panel. While this was a code violation, and a safety issue, it would have been mostly okay if the idiot that wired it hadn't mixed up the hot and neutral wires. So the neutral and ground were both hot, and her monitor apparently had some internal fault that led to the discovery.
This could have been lethal, if for example, someone was using an older power tool that had the metal case grounded for 'safety', then touched a pipe or similar with their other hand. A metal-cased power strip could have been shocking too..
Biting the hand that feeds IT
