Give me the nanny state and give it to me now!
On Sunday I realised that those laws about not being able to do your own electrical work were not just nannying for the sake of it – they are to protect idiots like me from themselves and should be extended to include the installation of ceiling fans.
Maybe it would help if the instructions did not tell you how to wire up one blue wire, one brown wire, and one yellow-and-green wire when most of us have 9 bloody wires coming out of the ceiling, three of them black and three red. But after some trial-and-error I managed to lose track of whether the power was cut off at the circuit breaker or not and took a shot of mains voltage.
No damage beyond an arm which would not stop shaking for a while, but I guess it could have been a lot worse.
D’oh indeed!