When I was in college, I had a professor (who had a PhD and everything! Though obviously not in electrical engineering) take part of a lecture one day to explain how to cut off the end of your television’s power cord and splice in a female plug. That way you’d need one of these male-to-male plugs to plug in the TV at all.
It was to keep his kids from watching TV when he didn’t want them to. He’d just unplug from the wall, then unplug the male-to-male extension, and then it couldn’t be plugged in.
When students protested, he insisted it was perfectly safe as long as you unplugged it from the wall first.
