Don’t charge your phone in bed: ‘It’s not worth your life’

Here was the headline on WAAY-TV: “Man nearly gets electrocuted after sleeping with phone on charger”.

And it was the story of Wiley Day of Huntsville, Ala., who fell asleep with his iPhone and was almost killed.

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Which might leave you with the impression that his near-death experience was another one of those smartphone malfunctions.

But it wasn’t. It was something far more insidious.

You see, Wiley Day wasn’t just sleeping with his iPhone. During the night, his charger ended up in the bed with him, dragging the extension cord it was plugged into. And the charger then worked its way out of the extension cord socket just enough to expose the metal prongs, which then got caught in the metal dog-tag necklace he was wearing.

“And my necklace became the conductor and it somehow, someway jolted me over here to the floor,” he said.

That necklace would have gotten red hot – and it left a nasty burn.

But the phone had nothing to do with it. The problem: the way American wall plugs are designed.

This may be a little geeky –- but U.S. wall plugs are really unsafe. In Britain, for example, the prongs of wall plugs are insulated halfway to the tip, so that even if they work loose, the partly-exposed prongs can’t give you a shock -– or electrify your accessories. But in America, our approach is: you learn the hard way.

So, as Day puts it, “Charge your phone away from you,” Day said. “It’s not worth your life.”

But this one’s on the wall plug. The verdict on the phone itself – NOT GUILTY.

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