Ground prong up would not stop this

[Congoleum Breckenridge]

[gfretwell]

Nor with any common NEMA 1-15 plug, no matter what the orientation of the unused ground pin was.

[Hawk]

I've done some stupid things as a kid, but never anything to that extent. I seriously question the level of intellect within the young generation nowadays.

Common sense definitely isn't common.

[TimR]

Sometimes I feel unimaginative, not having thought of that myself.

If I'd screwed up an outlet in my house as a kid, my Dad would have made me fix it.

When we lived in Germany that couldn't have worked. The prongs on a plug were insulated up to the point where they were far enough inside to make contact. You would have had to scrape the insulation off. Even that wouldn't be easy with those plugs.

I worked in a hospital where the teenagers would do something similar to smoke. (We didn't allow them to have matches. Did I mention it was a mental hospital?) They would force a wire from a spiral bound notebook through a rubber eraser, so they could insert it into an outlet. The wire would get hot quickly.