Is it safe to stick my multimeter probes in the wall socket ?

[madires]

I once accidentally touched a fully charged photoflash capacitor (330uF@380V). That will teach you some respect. My whole arm hurt for two days.

Ouch!

[ptricks]

I once accidentally touched a fully charged photoflash capacitor (330uF@380V). That will teach you some respect. My whole arm hurt for two days.

I have done that too. Was taking apart a digital camera and the cap voltage ran through a circuit board far away from the cap, touched it and damn that hurt 

[G7PSK]

I once got a 10K jolt from an electric fence that did no hurt as much as the landing on top of the metal gate. I was opening a metal gate while sitting on a horse and baked the hose into the electric cattle fence, I got zapped the horse got zapped and jumped forward about ten feet and upwards to boot so I got launched and landed on the gate one leg each side.

[M. András]

I get the impression that some people on here are scared shitless by the mains. As long as reasonable precautions are taken there is no reason to be scared of a few hundred volts in a system nor of high amps for that matter. The highest amperage that I have worked with is ten thousand, quite interesting as when switched the field in the conductor would make 200 KG of steel jump.

i can imagine the fences and blast proof walls around each socket in their house and the long ceramic rod which they use to plug in the plugs