Another map: which countries have the wrong electricity

On the calendar thread, we discussed America being ... unusual in comparison to the rest of the world.

The same goes for electricity. Here's a map.



So you're OK when you're travelling to Central America or the Caribbean or Taiwan. Or the wonderful holiday destination of Liberia. But beyond that, it's a struggle.

I suppose it's less of a problem now that the main electrical thing we travel with is a laptop with a transformer that will deal with pretty much anything. But I remember my mum getting into a terrible flap about her curling tongs when we went to America in the 80s and she had to maintain her 80s frizzy perm. There was an overheating transformer and all sorts of messing about.

I wonder why it happened. As far as I recall, America was the first place with municipal electricity supplies, so one would have thought that the rest of the world would have copied you.

Of course, it still means you're wrong. But on the plus side, you're not as wrong as Japan. And they can't even get their FM radios right.

 

Oooh, it would be.

When my parents first came to visit me in Shanghai, I wound them up horribly about the type of plugs they'd need.

China doesn't have a consistent standard on plugs (although it's working towards an upside-down version of the Australian plug). So hotels and most powerboards have sockets that will take anything.

So I told dad he needed to find plugs that would perfectly fit this socket.



He spent ages searching for the right sort of plug.

It was the best trick I'd played on him since I took him for his first Japanese meal and told him the green stuff was mashed watercress and that you should eat the whole lump in one go.

 

Yes, I remember Mum's hairdryer making this weak murmuring noise.

 

Here you go!




And here's a list of the types of plugs and sockets.

Electricity around the world: everything about plugs, sockets, voltages, converters, etc.

 

He does. But he didn't for a good 10 minutes. Not because he was angry, but because he couldn't speak.

It was in London, but it was a good restaurant frequented by Japanese expats (I had a couple of friends who worked there), so it was proper wasabi.

There've been so many: most of them convincing me of something that was singularly untrue. But as we're close to Christmas, I'll go for a festive one. I remember one Christmas when I was about 10 when Dad had used an oven thermometer when cooking the turkey. He told me the hole through the breast was where he'd shot it. I completely believed him, and told everyone.

My Dad's finest tricks were not on me though. One was an extraordinarily complex April Fool's trick on the German aircraft manufacturer Messerschmitt-Bölkow-Blohm in the 1980s, involving a new government policy that would necessitate multi-million-pound changes to an Anglo-German-Italian swing-wing technology. And another involved convincing my sister and her best friend that their new school had changed uniform policy and now required everyone to wear tweed underwear.