Static shocks can do damage.

Some weeks ago I was sitting at an office where everything was static (I think they did not ground the power outlets in the desks properly).

Every time I sat down I got a big hit. But one time my laptop crashed and shut down.

So back to the story: it might as well has to do with the shoes employee 2 is wearing and the way he/she walks.

Edit: from the poster on Reddit: "She wears a wool cover to stay warm."

I have a power cord that has everything but the ground wire cut and the single ground part of the plug plugged into the wall. Near my keyboard, I have the other end of the ground wire exposed. Before I touch my keyboard, I touch it. In the winter, 9/10 times I discharge a little shock. I've ruined keyboards and computers with my shocks, and since I installed this setup, zero problems.

I set up a coworker with this, after he killed his laptop by shocking it.

you could attach a resistor to the ground wire, and touch the other electrode of the resistor, with 2 resistors appropriately chosen (so that you don't fry the MM), you can put a multimeter across one of them and observe the discharge, or alternatively build a simple circuit that lights a LED as long as the voltage across the resistor is higher than some value... Discharging doesn't need to hurt..

That said, depending on the setup (type of ground system and electronics) it is not necessarily safe to touch the ground from an outlet!

In my old office, one of the girls got a humidifier to combat the dry air during wintertime. It also seemed to help with the amount of static buildup maybe by making it easier to dissipate. Not a fix by any measure, but it did seem to help a bit. Anyone else tried this?

Yes, a cold water with vibration humidifier. Everything is now covered by a thin layer of white dust from the water. We have medium soft water. A little less chocks I guess but we can't have this white dust everywhere so can't say for sure.

Like an oil diffuser? I think I've read to use distilled water to avoid that problem

We're in a soft water area, so that wasn't a problem! And the type we used heated the water, so most residue would stay within the humidifier.

30 years ago I was working at a place that just had started with computers. One of the older employees always had computer problems and had been told to spray the floor with softener by th IT staff tired of repairing the fried motherboard.

A few years later another company kept a stack of keyboards next to a lady that kept killing hers. They start working again after a while thanks to keyboards having a nice fuse. Just rotate them until the keyboard port fried one day. She was also wearing a wool sweater, big old stone building in northern Sweden...

>...old stone building

Yeah, I think we often forget that ground from the outlet is not necessarily local ground in the building materials (concrete and whatever)

I always thought that man made fibres were most prone to generating static. Wool, cotton and other natural fibres being least likely. Borne out by putting on or removing so many of those clever outdoors base layers accompanied by crackle that wool never has. Artificial commercial carpets positively encourage static too.

Something something long chain molecules something something better insulators, or something. :)

> Our head of security was furious

Furious with you or the vendor? How long did it take to fix, if ever?

I'm not sure if it ever did, it would have been the jurisdiction of the building management rather than our company. We had all our critical hardware locked in a separate room with analog locks so it wasn't an emergency at the time.

This was also years ago, so imagine it's been addressed and may have been at the time. I didn't keep testing it because it involves static shocking yourself, which is something I like to avoid.

Seems like glitching locks is still a thing: https://nfckill.com

Loss of control can result in anger.

Even if your not mad it sometimes helps to put on a show. Lets others know that you’re serious about security.

I remember these emails while in the Defense Industry. Sprinkled through the email would be choice words in all caps, and bolded, and in Italics, likely in red, maybe highlighted in some other color as well.

Such attempts at "letting others know you're serious about security" seemed more for CYA oversight purposes for the company's security department, but at least 100s of people got reeducated-by-email about proper door security during or after a fire drill.

I have had my monitor turn off when I touch my laptop whilst being statically charged. Might well be the issue here too, especially since they mention she wears wool quite often.

However, that was by direct touch, how that would happen when walking by is still a mystery to me :)

Wearing an old cellphone and the computer was old and no shielding? ;)

When we were still young and played a lot, we also overclocked a lot. At one hacker convent we had three computers with the hood of, all running w95. Any time there was a phone call (Nokia 3210 era) all three would get a bluescreen. The computers ran much better with hoods on except for the heat.