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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

What's the static electricity story here? I personally avoid any and all metal fixtures around my work desk, because I invariably end up being painfully shocked by them every time I shift on the chair[0]. At this point I habituated having small metal objects around me (e.g. key bundles), that I can use to discharge static before/during getting up, sitting down, etc.

Where 'ianthehenry mentioned here[1] they've made a desk surface out of steel, I pretty much fainted reading it.

(Worst related working experience in my life was, a few jobs back, customers' brand new headquarters built in the "modern" style of carpets + glass + aluminum. There, every single surface would shock me when I touched it with my bare hands - even glass window panes were out to get me.)

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[0] - Any of the several chairs I tried. So it's not just about the chair, I think.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33528148

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I live in Missouri, where winter humidity is super low and everything is shocky.

I actually liked having a steel top desk - I learned (conditioned myself) to put my hand on top of the desk while standing up, so the charge would let itself out of my hand gingerly rather than building up and blowing up my phone when I reached to pick it up. So I put a piece of aluminum tape and wired it to a grounded case (like my PC or directly to an outlet ground) and learned to put a finger on it every time I stood up.

I also use a lot of heavy duty staticide on fabrics. https://www.aclstaticide.com/products/heavy-duty-staticide

In some places I've had to use remote KVM extenders, which are HIGHLY susceptible to ESD pulses from office chairs. A few times every hour the screen blacks out for a second, usually returning to normal, just because someone stood up. D.C. Smith wrote a few papers [0][1] on it that bolstered the ESD-safe industry.

[0] http://emcesd.com/pdf/eos93.pdf

[1] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/819080

> In some places I've had to use remote KVM extenders, which are HIGHLY susceptible to ESD pulses from office chairs. A few times every hour the screen blacks out for a second, usually returning to normal, just because someone stood up.

Apparently so are HDMI cables. A HN thread few months ago clued me in on this, and this solved a weird issue I had with my work laptop: it would randomly bluescreen; at first, once a month, but after a year it was closer to once or twice a week. There was no obvious pattern to it, except it almost always happened within a minute of me getting up from the chair. I suspected it was overheating, but ensuring it's cooling properly didn't help. The problem went away when I stopped using and actually unplugged the external display, and now it seems very likely it was the cable picking up ESD from the gas piston of my office chair.

If I don't discharge myself to radiator, I'll discharge to macbook. It didn't cause damage yet, but I feel uneasy when that happens. So I prefer discharging myself often, especially at winter when air is dry.

If that's a big problem for you, it's possible to wear some resistor as a gadget and discharge via this resistor to some grounded thing. It'll limit electricity flow and you won't feel anything.

To me, the main factors are:

- shoes sole

- floor material (especially carpet)

- relative humidity

Combinations of all three explain all discharges I've endured :)

Seconded. I lived in Phoenix for a few years and the static was awful. Maybe OP lives in a humid place?

I think that there are a lot of aluminum Mac laptops in Phoenix (and other brands too.) Maybe some of their owners are reading this and can share their experiences with static, or the lack of.

What's in Phoenix that causes static electricity?

Low average relative humidity.

And the wrong kind of carpet, yikes. Loved the area, but never got used to the enormous static shocks I got in my office.

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