A 10-year-old girl asked the family Amazon Alexa for a challenge she could attempt after she and her mother were doing several harmless challengers to pass the time away. Alexa told her to plug in a phone charger, but not to push it all the way in. She would then be able to see the partially exposed plug. Alexa then told her to put a penny between two fingers and drop it onto the exposed plug. But, if you don’t let go intime, it could kill you.
Fortunately for the little girl and the legal department at Amazon, she did not do as instructed. Had she followed through, she could have been seriously injured or seriously dead. It was a TikTok challenge from last year that resulted in damage and or injury in many of the cases. Another challenge from last year is the rope challenge. That is where you climb on a chair, tie one end of the rope to a ceiling fixture and the other end to your neck and then jump off the chair.
Not that I have never participated in a challenge, because I have. I did the 30 story building challenge where you jump out the window of a thirty-story building. I suffered no injury whatsoever. I credit that to my common sense approach of jumping out of the first story window.
The mother recounted:
“We were doing some physical challenges, like laying down and rolling over holding a shoe on your foot, from a [Phys.] Ed teacher on YouTube earlier. Bad weather outside. She just wanted another one.”
That’s when Alexa suggested the challenge that it had “found on the web.”
In another tweet, Livdahl recalled that when the suggestion was made, “I was right there and yelled, No, Alexa, no! like it was a dog.”
Thankfully, her daughter didn’t participate in the challenge, telling her mother that “she is too smart to do something like that anyway.”
The “penny challenge,” as it is called, is one of several dangerous trends that have emerged on TikTok over the past several years. It instructs participants to create an electrical current with a loosely plugged-in wall charger before daring them to drop a coin onto the exposed prongs.
In response to the challenge, fire officials in the U.S. have issued warnings.
