How about an old Crompton 5ft fixture with an SRS ballast that had a crappy T5 adapter fitted.

T5 adaptor had shunted together pins at each end, so the ballast windings for filament heating were powering a dead short! Surprisingly it did work but I don't think the ballast would of lasted long. It's been removed now and a proper T12 65W tube fitted :-)

SRS does not have any windings to heat the filaments, if you short it its just LC circuit in series to the line. But quite close to resonance, so indeed damaging to the capacitor (high voltages that are present only for seconds with a properly starting lamp) and the ballast in general (high current so significant heating)

SRS does not have any windings to heat the filaments, if you short it its just LC circuit in series to the line. But quite close to resonance, so indeed damaging to the capacitor (high voltages that are present only for seconds with a properly starting lamp) and the ballast in general (high current so significant heating)

There is no resonance in the SRS, don't worry. The reason is, the widing style (the magnetic field of each coil cacels the field of the other one) suppresses the ballast inductace in the to-be LC, so it remains efectively just a capacitor parallel to the manis. So for the LED retrofit no differece to e.g. classic preheat circuit.

Everything I do!

Today, I saw a 200 watt incandescent in a 60 watt maximum fixture.

OK, that's  good one!  I've seen 100w in 60w max and 75w in 40w max but never 200w in 60w!

How about 500w in a 100w max fixture? Saw it at the state fair once.

How about 60W in 60W fixture. But one that is made of crappy plastic that melts anyway

Zarlog, my god!  Wow! That's CRAZY!

Someone (who is on LG but was telling me the story offline) has been telling me crazy stories about lights at their workplace...480v hooked up to a standard cheap yard blaster (of course ballast fried), MH lamps in MV NEMAs, and other bizarre and crazy things. 

In our hotel room, I saw that a fixture was hanging by its power wires, with no other support method.
If the wires break, bad things will happen.

Especially in a  hotel room of all places.  It's one thing if you're in the process of painting and hang fixtures loose because you still need light, but not for "normal" use!

It was more of an upside-down table lamp.

I admittedly did one today.  I salvaged a F96T12 slimline and HO fixture from the dump.  I had no lamps, and only had access to shunted bipin sockets, so I stuck a F32T8 between the red and blue wires of the HO ballast and tested it.  It was surprisingly not super overdriven, but I imagine this could be destructive with a spent lamp.  All just laying in the fixture channel, laying on the carpet.  But of course I didn't leave it running more than a minute or two just for testing.  

Today, I saw outdoor Christmas lights in a public space, there were lots of funny mistakes. Those mistakes include lots of plugs connected to each other, and a bare power strip in the ground. They were not on, but I fixed that by resetting the GFCI sockets.

Replaced a main breaker in a panel. With live power. As you can't disconnect the power before the main

Done by standing on a Plastic chair and being carefull to hold only the breaker (by its Plastic body, in air) or service drop wire (with isolated pliers), and not make contact with any Earth/Neutral/other conductor of different potential

Held the wire with pliers and detached the old breaker from the rail with an isolated screwdriver, pulled it all out, removed the breaker, cut off the old wire end (with a crimped spade terminal that would not be needed with the new breaker), stripped (with the pliers), inserted the new breaker onto the wire (modern breaker with enclosed terminals), tightened the terminal screw, and clipped it on the DIN rail