So the tech (or the person writing this up) mixed up "static" and "flea power"[1].

I believe the idea of "draining charge that shouldn't be there" has been properly conveyed nevertheless.

[1] https://en.everybodywiki.com/Flea_Power

It's difficult to imagine how the underlying fault here is anything other than a latch-up[1] event, likely manifesting on a upstream controller/supervisory chip in the power distribution chain.

The description of this "flea power" reads like some cargo cult narrative that summarily conflates a handful of disjoint electrical characteristics/phenomena. It's like the modus operandi of interwebs consumerism.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latch-up

I have, in several decades of operating and servicing computers and other electronic equipment, never heard of the term "flea power". According to that article it seems to have originated in a Dell service manual, which erroneously calls it "static electricity".

So what do you call it?

Looks like there's no standard term that everyone uses; I'd say it's entirely forgivable that the tech called it "static" for lack of a better word.

I've always referred to it as "residual" power/charge.

Is it incorrect to call it static electricity, though.

I mean... it's charge at rest... so electric and static, but in that same sense, there's static electricity in batteries, and static electricity in DRAM (in-between refresh cycles), and any oscillator at the moment when the first time-derivative of charge reaches zero.

I submit that a definition of static electricity as "charge at rest at non-ground potential" is so broad as to exist in any non-trivial circuit and many trivial circuits. Such a definition is therefore less useful than more common notion as electricity generated as a result of physical surface interactions of dissimilar materials.

Calling it "static electricity" is likely to cause reasonably intelligent and well-educated people to conclude it's related to wearing wool socks in Winter while being insufficiently grounded, as opposed to charge being there as a result of normal circuit operation.

Is it really, though -- isn't what happens inside capacitors basically the same thing as we call "static electricity" when it happens between other surfaces? Or, IOW, isn't pretty much anything potentially (Heh!) a capacitor, only pretty much all things except the ones purpose-built as such are really bad capacitors?