About a year ago I was in Chicago to attend an NFPA 70E seminar for electrical safety in the workplace. The presenter first pointed out that the extension cord that the hotel gave him for his projector so he could teach about electrical safety was damaged, with parts of the outer jacket missing. Ironic, huh? Not too long into his talk he also pointed out that all the receptacles in the room were mounted sideways (not sure if hot or neutral was up). Before the seminar he had done some checking. The ground up/ground down issue had been vigourously discussed by the powers that be in Chicago, the result being a local code, at least for hotels, that recepts must be sideways!
I bought an older house two years ago that had all receptacles on the ground floor mounted 'wrong', ground up. The previous owner was not a handyman so I chalked it up to his 'foolishness'. (This was before I learned that there are legitimate(?) reasons for doing it both ways.) The pre-sale electrical inspection revealed that the ground location really didn't matter, because the circuits feeding them were only two conductor, and the ground pin was floating in mid-air. The kicker was, presumably in order to bring this older house up to current safety codes, he had installed GFCI receptacles in the bathrooms. These didn't have grounding conductors attached either, so were useless as a protection device. They only worked when you pressed the test button.
