and things like chargers tend to have plastic prongs with metal tops.
In what alternate universe do chargers have plastic prongs?
I have at this moment five "wall wart" chargers, including an official Apple iPad charger, right in front of me and not one of them follows this "plastic prong" design you cite.
I'm not sure why you feel that sleeping on a charger plugged into a live extension cord could only end in sadness in America but I question your logic process in arriving at that conclusion.
Before you wade in: Lived the first 30 years of my life in the UK, father was a chartered electrical engineer and so we did all our own rewiring, and plug installation was taught to me at school since (and American readers will find this hysterically funny) things like hair dryers, washing machines and soldering irons didn't come with a plug fitted out of the box - nominally because in the 1970s you could find upwards of three different plug standards in the same house but actually because UK manufacturers were tight as a crab.
Yes, every purchase mandated a trip to the local hardware store to buy a plug (almost always left fused at 13 amps no matter what the application was to be - so much for the much-vaunted safety) or the removal of a plug from something else.
When I was a teenager, every home had at least one small electric appliance with a cord ending in two pathetic dangling leads because its plug had been scavenged for another device. In summer you would steal the plug from an electric fire to equip, say, a reading lamp, then in the autumn you'd disable your sister's curling tongs so you could have warm feet *and* be able to see to read.
Eventually someone would break down and go and buy a plug, at which point a new appliance would appear in-theater.
And there are some classic pix out there of how people could subvert the "safety" of British sockets to extract juice without the need of a plug or perhaps only needing the pins from a plug shattered in some accident because, despite the charming belief of clever young things, UK plugs are nowhere near indestructible and the people who want to use the magic wall juice are just as cunning and just as unintelligent was those who do the same sort of thing Stateside when they have a shortage of the proper equipment needed.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
