For the vast majority of smartphone owners, charging a handset is nothing more than a mundane necessity. You plug it in. You wait a while. You unplug it. You go about your day.
But very occasionally, for an unlucky few, this unavoidable chore turns into something more eventful. More dramatic. Even horrific.
Take Wiley Day. One evening last month, the Huntsville, Alabama man took his iPhone to bed as usual, leaving it on charge via an extension cord as he slept.
On any normal morning, he would’ve awoken refreshed, ready to begin the day with a fully charged phone.
But on this particular morning, as he rolled over in bed, the dog-tag necklace he was wearing accidentally connected with the exposed prongs of the charger head, which had loosened from the cord as he slept.
Wiley suffered a huge electric shock, the force of it causing second- and third-degree burns to his neck and hands.
“I just thought, that’s how you die,” 32-year-old Day said in a recent interview with local media.
Describing the highly unfortunate episode as “the most scariest morning I’ve ever been through in my life,” Day said the severe shock jolted him out of his bed and onto the floor.
He managed to end the agony by yanking the chain from his neck, but the burns he suffered required immediate medical attention.
According to the Washington Post, “Day’s shirt was singed, with a small hole burned out.” It described “strips of skin and flesh missing where the metal chain had scorched his neck,” adding that “the pattern of the necklace was burned into parts of his hands where he had gripped the chain to try to tear it off.”
Day clearly had a lucky escape and is now recovering from his ordeal.
It’s not the first time for a smartphone to be linked to an electrocution incident. Last year a U.K. man died as he attempted to charge an iPhone while taking a bath, while a few months earlier a woman in Malaysia was killed in another phone charging incident.
Keen for others to avoid what he went through, Wiley Day urged other handset owners to “charge your phone away from you … charge it the next day. It’s not worth your life.”
