Here's an experiment that might make sense. Of course just do it in your head.
Take two AA batteries and put one stacked against the other just like they would be in a flashlight. Pretend this is your tiny little secondary winding on the pole. How the electric gets into these batteries doesn't really matter and the fact that it's 1.5VDC instead of 110VAC really doesn't either.
So take the point where these two batteries touch together and ground it...for no reason at all. With your meter, you measure 1.5V between on end of this battery stack and ground and the same between the other end and your ground, right?
Now from one end of your stack to the other end is 3V, right? Now you've got two hot legs and a neutral.
What if instead of grounding the center point, you left it ungrounded, or even attached it to one end of some other battery somewhere? You still get 1.5V on each leg to ground and 3V across both batteries. But...the voltage of the center point is not necessarily at the same voltage as ground anymore. That's okay, there's nothing wrong with that. you still get the voltage you had before.
The problem is that in our houses, we want our neutrals to all be at the same voltage. To do this they all have to be tied to some reference point, and we chose to use the ground.
But even the earth's ground voltage changes all the time. When there's a lightening storm, it vary's all over the place, light hitting the earth causes a negative charge to form as do all sorts of radiation. But we don't notice because we all change our ground voltage along with the earth. As long as the whole neighborhood is on the same ground, no body gets hurt.
When you walk across a carpet and get a shock touching the doorknob that happens because you and the doorknob had a different ground voltage. Had you both been attached to a driven rod, that wouldn't have happened.
If your house and garage aren't attached to the same ground, the results of moving from one to the other would be worse than that static shock. So everything gets grounded for no reason other than to keep us all working at the same ground voltage...whatever that is today.
I know this is long but I can't come up with a short way to say it. Hopefully somebody more elequent than me will come along.
