One day when I was 13, I was trying to hook up an extra outlet into the fort we built in the room at the end of our large basement room. I had the cover off of the fuse box and was going over the logic of how it all worked. At that time we had screw in fuses. Sometimes we would put pennies in them when we ran out of spare fuses. Wow was that ever stupid. We had extra side boxes coming out of the side of the main box. I took the fuse out of this box, and now knew it to be safe to work in there with my fingers and pliers. Little did I know that the fuse only disconnects one side of the circuit and the other is still hot. When I stuck the long needle nose pliers in the box to attach my new wire, the pliers touched the side of the box and blue sparks flew everywhere. When I realized that now I was almost against the wall on the other side of the room and looked down at my now short needle nose pliers, I knew I should be more careful with the fuse box. In later years, I have learned just how dangerous that event was and have much more respect when I go into a fuse box. I still have the ground down pliers (see photo) that no one really knows why they are the shape they are. They have black handles and we use them to put plaques on bleachers.
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