Power Cords for the Dummy DIYer

Two prongs, two wires!

The business model of ye olde eHow.com was fairly simple: the site scraped internet searches, filtered out all the ones like "Natalie Portman nude," and let a stable of contributors answer any "how-to" and "what-is" questions that remained. Some of the questions, to be honest, were pretty stupid. What's even stupider, though, is that many a J-school grad went ahead and "answered" the stupid ones anyway... anything for a buck, we guess. That's apparently why Kimberley Johnson posted "How to Replace a Two-Prong Power Cord With a Three-Prong," now available at HomeSteady.com.

Johnson, drawing on her UGa journalism degree, explained the difference between 2- and 3-prong plugs to her audience:

"Power cord plugs are outfitted with either two or three prongs, with the three-pronged variety used for safety in large appliances such as washers and dryers. The extra prong, which is round instead of flat, grounds the appliance and prevents electric surges, and each prong has a separate wire that attaches to it."

So many words, so few of them on target! We'll start with the most glaring error: grounding an appliance doesn't "[prevent] electric surges," it guards against electrical shocks. And those three-prong plugs on dryers? some of them are 240-volt plugs, not the ones you'd find on a toaster (which will also have a three-prong plug).

What originally caught our staffer's eye, however, is the downright stupidity of the notion that anyone would replace a two-prong plug with a three-prong plug: you can plug an ungrounded plug into a grounded outlet, no problem, so why would you want to? Only the OQ knows for sure...

Kimberley, however, forged ahead with  her ignorant "solution," which included the following in its seven steps:

• "2: Cut the cord off approximately a half inch above the plug..."
• "3: Pull the center prong section out of the plug housing. Insert the cut end of the cord through the back of the plug housing."
• "4: Locate the three inner wires, which are white, black and green. Strip another half inch of the plastic coating off the end of each wire."

Everyone on our staff laughed uproariously at Kimberley's bull. You know why? Because no power cord that ends in a two-prong plug is going to have three wires in it: it isn't grounded! Yet our Dumbass of the Day carefully reworded the instructions for replacing a grounded plug. That's instead of explaining to the OQ that the task is possible but quite frankly stupid. Sheesh.

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