- I have been alive for quite a while, especially as compared to the average.
- I have, over the course of my life, handled multiple electronics, devices, and wiring which were live and connected to mains current at the time and while I was not wearing the proper protective gear. Some of these devices failed while I was doing so, at times spectacularly (and memorably!).
- I have also been involved in multiple vehicular accidents, both minor and serious, and as both operator and as passenger, many of which destroyed the vehicle beyond the ability to repair it. I was able to walk away from all of them, with the worst injury I ever received being only an abraded shoulder.
- I was mugged once in Detroit* after deciding to walk home solo from a festival downtown. The mugger felt sorry for me and took the time to gave me back $5 of the $20+ or so he took from me so that I could catch the bus the rest of the way home.
- Even after all of the above, I am still alive, whole, and (so far as I am told), in significantly better than average health.
Some people might look at these incidents and take them as "evidence" that electricity, vehicle operation, and walking alone
at night in a neighborhood
internationally renowned for being "risky" must therefore not be at all dangerous, and the warning notices, regulations, and so-called "common sense advice" regarding them must be nothing more than fearmongering.
But of course this is not true. I (that is, me, all by myself) constitute what is referred to in the biz as "an insufficiently small sample size (N=1)." Heck, even
Chemistry, a discipline/science that has been around in one form or another for literal
thousands of years gives inconsistent results between experiment runs once you are mixing together only a handful of atoms instead of the more common quantities usually measured in mole
s (plural). Welcome to Quantum Theory, pal, where the rules feel made up and the points seem to matter less than you might think. You can't make blanket judgements/predictions for other people based solely on
my experiences with electricity, vehicles, and questionable spur-of-the-moment decisions. There are too many variables involved.
I know there are people out there who say that you can't trust what anyone says unless you've seen/verified the evidence with your own eyes/hands in your own presence. Like someone already said above, you're far more likely to accept something as Truth when it happens to you or someone close to you, because either you were right there, vacuuming up the experience as it unfolds directly into your brain via your own eyeballs, or because someone close to you shared their experience. But there has to come a point where you (and even your immediate circle) can't possibly try every experiment, eat every food, watch every movie, drive every vehicle, or learn every language...which is why you might ask a waitress, "What's good today?" or go to Rotten Tomatoes, or read
Car and Driver, or use Google Translate.
Anyway, my point is this: If it is impossible for
you to take
my experiences and use them to guarantee the same thing will happen
to you when you have to swap out a mid-circuit 3-wire duplex receptacle using inadequate tools and while the feed wires are still live, then you also cannot reliably use
your previous experience with COVID to guaranteed predict what would happen
to me (or, for that matter, to anyone
else who isn't you) if contracted. Don't electrocute yourself just because some other dude on the Internet happened to have a lucky streak as a kid. I'm not here today because of some miracle of Ohm's law, I'm here today because Murphy was busy somewhere else at the time I was being blissfully unaware of the risks I was taking.
--Patrick
*The mugging actually happened in Highland Park, which is about 7 miles up Woodward Ave from Hart Plaza in Detroit, where I started my walk.