Herbert, On Tue, 23 Jan 2007 11:27:27 -0500, Herbert Graf wrote: > On Tue, 2007-01-23 at 09:31 +0000, Alan B. Pearce wrote: > > >> In the bedroom! My girlfriend (who is from New York) finds > > >>it annoying that she can't dry her hair in the bathroom, > > >>but it's the way we do it here. > > > > > >Wow, that sucks, especially the noise factor affecting other > > >people. At least in the bathroom you can close the door. > > > > Most of the rest of us would hope the bedroom door closes as well ... > > Yes, but if one person is already doing something in the bedroom (i.e. > someone called on the phone)... And what about when someone else wants to use the bathroom? I think you're grabbing at straws to find a good reason to do things the way you are used to... > I'm nitpicking, my point is I don't personally agree that removing a > "real" outlet from the bathroom REALLY improves safety (especially in > lieu of using a GFCI). Well firstly they were never "removed" - we've never had them so nobody thinks it's unusual or a problem. As for the safety aspect, I think it's glaringly obvious: Doing something that is inherently safer (removing the electricity from the place) must be better/more reliable than using an active device to make something safe, when the device can fail and thus leave a dangerous situation that would only be discovered by a potentially disasterous event. It's a bit like saying that car brakes don't need to be reliable because there are seat belts and airbags in case they fail! And it's not 100% certain that a GFCI/RCD will trip fast enough and at a low enough current to prevent a fatality - the 30mA/30mS rating that seems to be the standard is right on the edge of the "safe" region of a general electric shock, and above what's safe for a trans-cardiac shock - I for one wouldn't want to test it to find out! :-) > The lack of a "real" outlet is an inconvenience, and any time you > inconvenience people for what appears to be no good reason they WILL do > things to get around the inconvenience, usually in very dangerous ways. But nobody* in the UK sees it as an inconvenience! Most houses have only one bathroom, and a lot of those have the toilet in there too, so the problem is a queue to use the room, so spending time in there that can be spent elsewhere is the problem we face. * IMHO, as I haven't asked them all :-) > It's like at the gas stations in my area, at one point they all removed > the little "latch" that allowed you to turn on the pump and walk away > (to clear windows). Someone thought that latch was unsafe (and in the > way they were right), so they all removed it. > > People all of a sudden had to stand there holding the nozzle. What did > people do? They started using OTHER items to hold the pump level. Some > of the things people used where heavy and off centre, sometimes causing > the nozzles to fall out (if people didn't insert it enough), so you had > situations where gas started spraying everywhere. Certainly, MUCH safer > then if they had just left the latches... Again, we've never had these latches - they have never been allowed so nobody misses them - we just stand there while the tank fills, and it's not a problem, and is inherently safer than leaving the pump running unattended. > My point is, when you want to make something "safer", you can't just > look at how to make it safer. You must also consider how people will > react, what stupid things they will do to "get around" your efforts to > make something safer. Often people will find the most clever and at the > same time dangerous way to bypass your attempt to make something safer, > resulting in a LESS safe environment then if you hadn't made any > changes. While I agree that people are inventive and versatile (which may be why we're top species on this planet) you can't judge other places just by your own experience. The UK isn't just like America with no guns and a funny accent (we have *dozens* of funny accents :-) and things are done differently, and people are used to that. Personally I find a lot of the way electricity is done in the US surprising, such as a design of plug that can just fall out of the socket due to the weight of the cable or wall-wart, and in doing so can expose the live pins when it's half-inserted... and the availability of an adaptor that allows a 3-pin plug to plug into a 2-pin socket, and unless you take extraordinary measures (undoing a retaining screw to connect the earth) you have created a potentially fatal situation of a metal-cased device which isn't earthed - but the safety emphasis there seems to be much more on preventing fires than preventing electric shock, so it's not for me to say it's wrong, it's just the way you do things. Cheers, Howard Winter St.Albans, England -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist