...Just Staggering

Every day, I get surprised by static electricity.  One might say it’s...startling  

I'm dumbfounded, Jeremy.  You had a perfect opportunity to make the world's dumbest joke and you passed it up?  

Well, that pretty much is the joke.  Thanks for ruining it.  

You ruin comedy all the time.  Mostly by writing it.  

So anyway, it is winter.  A time of cold temperatures and dry air.  This leads to two things.  First, I wear a coat when I go outside.  My coat (actually one of two coats, but they're largely the same, so we're splitting hairs now) is made of wool which is magnificent at storing up massive amounts of static electricity.  The second part is that the dry air is a significantly worse conductor of electricity, meaning that the charge build-up is not allowed to dissipate quite as much as it would in more humid air. 

I've never put an ammeter to myself while being discharged, but I estimate the total charge collected in my woolen capacitor coat to be 8.3 metric craploads.  

All of this charge is stored up in my coat every time I come into work because that's how the world works.  All of this charge is discharged the moment I attempt to hang my coat up in the little metal cabinet in my office.  Because that's also how the world works.  

No matter what I try to do, I can't seem to stay properly grounded while taking my coat off, meaning I get the world's second worst electric shock (only surpassed by the one generated standing up off my couch and touching the metal plate around the light switch) every fricking day.  It doesn't matter what I do, like trying to stay in contact with the metal housing while taking the coat off, slapping the door, wearing metal shoes, etc.  It always ends the same way...with poor Jeremy getting a static shock from my cabinet.  I don't know why I find this so astounding now, since it happens all the time, but for some reason, I'm never expecting it.