
Thinnet to Earth... Thinnet to Earth...
We once had a colleague, let him be known as Anon, who knew much more than we did about electricity, so when he found that none of the Thinnet cables that arrived in his lab had properly earthed shields, he carefully soldered them all to earth (or ground, as it's known in Umrika). And then he told us that our Ethernet had an unacceptably high error rate despite his improvements.
We then explained the concept of earth loops to Anon and removed all his helpful solder. With all the 50 Hz electricity gone, things worked much better.