My biggest wake up call was when I got hung in the neutral on a 277 volt circuit.
Was doing a renovation to an older commercial building. The building had a "crawl space" that was about 4 foot tall with dirt floor. You had to walk all the way around the building to the rear to gain access then climb your way through conduits and plumbing pipes to get to where I was going. it was a real pain in the butt.
There were some new light circuits with exit / emergency lights on them stubbed into a junction box down in the crawl space.
I routinely arrived to the site around 6 am and opened it up and started working. The GC and everyone else didn't get there until 7 am. I had turned on some light circuits and noticed a couple exit / emergency lights were not working. I automatically figured I crossed up the neutrals in the j - box down in the crawl space. I left the circuits on and went to crawl my way back to the j box. Sure enough I had made the splices up wrong. I thought about climbing out and walking around the building and turning off the circuit, then walking back around and climbing back through . I figured the heck with that, I can resplice this hot in less time then it would take to climb out of here.

NOt to sure exactly what I did but I do remember standing there with my arms frozen up ion that box, getting shocked. The entire time I was thinking " you are going to die if you do not get away from this" Not sure how I got away from that box but when I came to I was laying in the dirt, my heart beating like it was coming out of my chest , my arms, neck and shoulders hurt like hell and I had one hell of a headache.
I don't know if I was able to jerk away and hit my head on a cast iron drain and was knocked out, or I passed out and relaxed and fell hitting my head.
I never did anything like that again.

Last edited by luckyshadow; 12/20/17 11:49 AM.