A childhood belief about around the house

My dad once told me when i was very very young that when you left things like televisions on, you were wasting energy and shortening its life (now i know of course that he ment energy in genral and not the TV's energy, and that by "shortening its life" he actually meant it breaking, and not actually dieing) . Anyway, I naturally belived, and thought that there were little people in all the electrical things, like televisions, ovens, etc. And i thought that if the teledied, then they would die. So for a whole week, i ran around the house turning everything off, and on the last day I went to pull a plug from behind the television and I got a massive electric shock!!! I was flung accross the room, and spent a week in hospital...I never played with electricity again...