During an ill-advised electrical experiment in my youth, I discharged a big capacitor into my hand. Luckily I think the current just went into and then out of my thumb back into the circuit. Still, the resulting shock knocked me over and gave me a tangible and valuable lesson about caution around high currents!

I've never been hit by 240V thankfully, but when I was a kid I felt 120V when plugging a computer into the wall.

I can confirm that 230V is plenty to give you a serious jolt -- like, throw you a couple feet backwards from the thing you shouldn't have touched. I imagine it could've killed me if the connection hadn't been so rapidly broken.

And that came from the "ground" pin of an outlet! Except that the building (in a third-world country that I'll leave unnamed here) hadn't been wired correctly, as I learned the hard way.

> I think you actually need to be pretty unlucky to die from an electric shock at home.

Though if there's one thing we've learned from the article, there will be plenty of people waiting in the wings of the Intenet to sputter "Karma!" and "Darwin!" when you do.

Aside, if you ever feel like saying that sort of thing, take an idea, principal, or religious icon that has a deep meaning to you, or in the latter case, someone whose work you think was influential and great. Fix that image in your mind, think "serves you right, asshole", and scream the word or the name out at the top of your lungs. Then reflect on how fucking stupid that was.

> Aside, if you ever feel like saying that sort of thing, take an idea, principal, or religious icon that has a deep meaning to you, or in the latter case, someone whose work you think was influential and great. Fix that image in your mind, think "serves you right, asshole", and scream the word or the name out at the top of your lungs. Then reflect on how fucking stupid that was.

Uh...

That's fucking stupid because I presumably picked an idea or person that's completely unrelated to the concept of "play stupid games, win stupid prizes". Also because I'm at the top of my lungs. If I called out something like "Midgley'd!" it wouldn't share those reasons for being fucking stupid at all.

Depends - if the path it takes is through your heart (or head) you're probably going to have a bad time. eg touching live with one hand and neutral with the other.

I've had a few mains shocks before as well, a fair few years ago, and what saved me was live and neutral touched the same hand. I now have an inductance tester I use first, then follow up with multimeter and only THEN do I start whatever I'm doing.