Nearly got fired...
...early on in my career I had to take a brand spanking new digital storage oscilloscope out to 'the field'. At this point the DSO was a new invention and cost more than my house, car, and possibly spouse.
I went out to the trailer at the work site, plugged it in... And its power supply went up like a volcano. Took out the main CPU board, too.
Turns out there were three problems: 1:the lazy fscking electrician who wired the trailer was asked to provide a circuit of split phase 240V couldn't be bothered to install an outlet with a NEMA L6 socket and just wired 240V to a standard 120V NMEA 5 socket. 2: the standard half bridge power supply architecture that can work on either 120 or 240V without a hard switch was not yet ubiquitous and sure as hell wasn't featured in my DSO. 3: I plugged it in
I nearly got fired because I didn't take a meter to the outlet before plugging in the scope. W.T.F.! Who does? The whole point of a standard outlet is ... Standardization!
Biting the hand that feeds IT
