Handy Tricks Six

Step 26 Float Your Scope

Cut the damn ground pin off your scope.
If you think the case might electrocute you now, well, don't touch the case.
Grounding the case isn't exactly safe either. If you're working on a high voltage circuit and your scope is grounded, you might as well hold a water pipe with one hand. Not safe.

This trick isn't so important now that scopes have so many channels and A-B knobs. But education hasn't improved, so people are still burning probes out by not understanding the difference between "ground", "reference", and "signal".
It would be nice to have a high impedance reference clip instead of a low-impedance ground clip. Anyone listening at Tektronix?

I learned to use an oscilloscope in the good old days when there was one trace and very few knobs.
At least on the scopes you got for free.
Usually someone would want to use your scope to fix a their band's PA amplifier.
They'd hook the ground lead from the scope onto the amp's black output wire, and POOF!
That amp channel is burned out now, literally "in a flash", regardless of what else used to be wrong with it.
How did that happen? The black wire on an amp or stereo isn't usually ground. Usually it's one channel of a push-pull amplifier. The ground clip from the scope is ground. They just shorted an amplifier output to ground. Of course it burned out.

And now my probe is melted. Usually they'd wreck the other probe by leaving it on the floor and rolling back and forth over it with an office chair while talking about big ideas.

Solution. Float the scope. And hide your good probes.