Maybe I am accident-prone, but I think I have touched a US mains voltage (120VAC RMS) at least half a dozen times in my life. It's not fun, but I am not hardly dead either. I have always sort of assume everyone else has. Wires get frayed. Little kids are overly enthusiastic about putting keys into small holes (that was the worst one). Shit happens. Any of you somehow completely avoided doing this?
I have. Exactly once. When I was very young, curious to know what was inside, I stuck a screwdriver into a wall socket. To this day I can remember how painful and frightening it was.
That was, apparently, not enough to teach me the lesson. When I was a few years older I tried lighting a small neon bulb by very carefully inserting the bare wires into a wall socket. Rather than getting the desired effect, one of the wires worked its way across the socket and caused a short circuit. A loud bang came from the socket quickly followed by a molten ball of wire. Fortunately the molten wire missed my eyes.
That was enough to stop me from ever again being shocked by line voltage.
To really drive the point home, a coworker was nearly killed by 220V. If your muscles tighten gripping the live wire it is impossible to let go. In my coworker's case, he could not move at all. In that situation, a quick death from a stopped heart would be a welcome exit compared to being frozen in place slowly cooking to death.
I have had a few mains shocks in my life and once a shock from a monitor tube (that one I do not want to repeat) but the worse ones for me are the pin prick burns from touching cold cathode inverters accidentally, they can take weeks to clear the deep burn marks.
I touched the 220VAC several times in the past. The first one was when I was a teenager. Very short touches, for my luck 
Now in Italy we have 230VAC but I didn't try it yet 
Many times, two bad ones though.
Underneath my house I grabbed the bare end of a wire I was running under the floor. I "knew" that the other end was not connected, wrong. To make matters worse I had bare feet on damp ground.
Luckily my arm muscles were stronger than my finger muscles and the wire was short, so my arm pulled my grip from the wire. I had burn holes all along one finger for ages.
Next time I was changing a light fitting, I used to often leave the wires hot for simple jobs because it's such a pain to reset all the digital clocks 
Normally I used a screw driver with an insulated shaft but not this time, the shaft was hot and I touched it. My triceps contracted and I threw the screwdriver across the room, it embedded into the wall not far from my missus.
For years now I've been in the habit of brushing any mains wire with the back of my fingers before working with it, just in case.
Rob
I learnt my lesson from an exposed 240vac plastic plug, the top of it had broken exposing a pin, I went to turn it off and my whole arm began to shake, never even touched it, hurt like hell...
I've only used a multimeter; insulated screwdrivers etc since.... assuming it won't eventually kill you, chances are it will.
I've only casually brushed a live wire a couple of times with a dry finger, got just enough tingle to realize "Damn! that was close!" , never had a big jerk away wildly out of control reaction.
Many times. The worst was when I was moving a lighting circuit from an old fusebox to the new one. I pulled the fuse for the downstairs lights and disconnected the cable from the old fusebox. There couldn't be any current on it...but there was. Someone had crossed the wires in an upstairs/downstairs switch so that both circuits were live with only one of the fuses in place. I was stuck on the 250V AC cable for a couple of minutes, until the other 5A fuse blew. I don't want to repeat that!
The other thousand people are not posting because they're dead
cjdelphi:
The other thousand people are not posting because they're dead
The reason I asked is because this has happened to me several times and frankly, I am underwhelmed. Now, I was never drenched in salt water and standing in a puddle when this happened, but still. I do wonder about the people in 240V countries. I have to imagine that the voltage is substantially more dangerous there.
My shocking experiences:
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Once, when I was young, we had dogs and watered them using a kiddie pool. It was my job to clean the pool out on occasion. Bailing it was tortuous, so I came up with a solution: I used an old but working swamp cooler pump connected to a hose to pump it out. One day, it fell over into the water. Stupidly, I reached in to put it back upright, forgetting it was an exposed motor. Buzz...
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As a kid I was once riding my go-cart in our back yard, and the accelerator got stuck. I panicked, turned wrong, and ran into a tree. I hastily reached back to flip the cut-off clip (next to the spark plug) on the engine to kill it. Missed the clip, grabbed the spark plug (no rubber boot on it either). Buzz...
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First time going to Burning Man in 2003. Got there early-am on Sunday dark, set up camp, went to bed. Got up the next morning, and one of my camp-mates said a nearby camp was having problems starting their orange-polka-dotted-fur covered VW golf art-car. I went to help. Was trying to find out if they had spark with no tools by popping a spark plug boot off and having them crank the engine. I was hot, sweaty, and leaning my arms on the radiator support. Crank...buzz (big buzzed - hurt). I did get a nice ham-sandwich out of it for lunch, and we did get the engine started (burned wires to the fuel pump). I was the "hero" for the rest of the burn, and got free rides around the playa at night when I saw them tooling around...
After 40 plus years of working as an electronics engineering technician, part of those years under USN training. One has meet with sparkies juice a few times.
I will state it is not the voltage that kills but it is the current. With that said there is a specific current range that is the most deadly. (clarifying this is true for those being electrocuted not those being "fried")
I have been zapped by 12v, 24v, 48v, and 120VDC all they way up to 15KV, as well as 48v, 120v, 240v, 480VAC. AC seems much worse as it is grabby, DC is a knock where AC is a buzz but seems to hang on. With 440 cycle AC much more so then the normal home 50/60.
Of course the debate on which is more deadly has roots back to Edison and Westinghouse on which is better for feeding the needs of the world supply.
The path through the body is critical for danger side with shock that flow through the heart even very low voltage can cause irregular arrhythmia's. In year past if you got sparked you just kept on doing the job, but in today's age employers expect you to make the trip to medical to check your EKG as dictated by OSHA.
As stated all here reading or posting have the tale to tell so we have experienced the feeling, we will not likely hear posting of those who failed to live to tell their tale.
Once spent a weekend helping move office.
The place we were moving from had a custom mains plug designed for shallow underfloor boxes, and the place we were moving to had standard UK square 13 amp plugs, so nearly every item of electrical gear had to have the old plugs taken off, and new ones put on. Over the weekend we worked two twelve hour days - we moved gear and furniture, stripped out network cable and rewired mains leads.
Came Monday morning, there was still cabling to do and to this day, I can only assume it was extreme tiredness that caused me to strip down a live extension block.
It made me jump and tingled for a while - no big deal.
On the other hand, I used to work for BT, and the horror stories told as part of safety training there stay with me today.
The exchange bus bars were typically bare (only 50V) but consisted of copper plates about 8mm thick and 15 to 20 cm wide, stacked five or six deep.
Currents of 800 amps were not uncommon, enough to melt a wedding ring or metal watch strap, or in one story, vapourise a paint can placed across the bars by an unwary painter.
Crosh, I'm with you spark plugs are nasty, once grabbed just the cable near the boot, won't be doing that again 
AWOL:
On the other hand, I used to work for BT, and the horror stories told as part of safety training there stay with me
TWT psus were my pet hate.
120VAC, 440VAC and 600VDC.
120VAC is just a mild twitch and one actually feels pretty god afterwords. Work on servicing machinery and you will hit it from time to time and some of those fool engineers can really find some fun ways to hide 120V for you to find...
440VAC one time had a couple little burn marks on my arm. 2 spots a couple inches apart.
600VDC from the high voltage connection on a couple 6BG6 tube in a 60W Heathkit CW Transmitter. (if you have to ask, it will take to long to explain) Don't really remember touching it, but I do remember running into the door frame and seeing my hands in front of me, opening and closing as they slowly came out of the fog. And somehow my glasses were in the next room, behind me on the floor. Seemed like every nerve in my body was buzzing.
Never got into it, but 270VAC has the reputation for being the worst voltage to get into. Don't know why, from any personal experience, but that is its reputation.
JoeN:
cjdelphi:
The other thousand people are not posting because they're deadThe reason I asked is because this has happened to me several times and frankly, I am underwhelmed. Now, I was never drenched in salt water and standing in a puddle when this happened, but still. I do wonder about the people in 240V countries. I have to imagine that the voltage is substantially more dangerous there.
Yep. About twice as dangerous...
You know, the point to this thread was to determine if anyone had NEVER touched a mains voltage. No takers so far. I wonder if they exist. We hear that mains voltage is so incredibly dangerous, yet everyone has touched it at least once or twice. Even in my talking to non electrical nerds this is the case even among the general population. So why aren't more people fried? I think the danger is overblown unless you are soaked in salt water. But, my middle name is still Danger.
JoeN:
But, my middle name is still Danger.
So, sue your parents.
Boardburner2:
TWT psus were my pet hate.
OT: Mine too, briefly.
Or rather, the tubes themselves.
Being thermionic, they were very sensitive to thermal shock, and microwave stations had no climate control.
I was tasked with trying to find relationships between TWT failures, events and environment, and stations were usually
a) unmanned
b) remote
c) had only station logs to record faults.
I drove up a lot of mountains that summer!