I don't. Now my games are properly grounded. If I'm going to be removing and circuit board from the head, or putting it back in. I do touch the metal plate the boards mount on, just to be careful.

Static shock may not kill an IC, but it might get it to degrade over time.

LTG : )

Yeah, it really depends on exactly what you zap. Some things are far more tolerant than others. If you want to be really safe, sure, use a strap. It won't hurt anything to do so. I've never once used a strap myself....but I've also spent my entire time in pinball with hardwood floors.

Only marginally related, because it does depend on the components and WHERE you zap them, but good for a laugh:

In a high reliability environment - your senior analyst was right.
Quite often - you can very easily end up with latent defects within RAM (which happens to be one of the most susceptible devices). These are often referred to as the 'walking wounded' devices.

I usually wear slippers or shoes with rubber soles to help avoid the static electricity issue. I also don't wear fleece or sweaters, or any other materials that can build up a static charge. I'll usually touch metal to ground myself as a precaution before handling electronics. All of that is basically habit at this point.

I handle electronics all the time and have never used a grounding strap. I can usually feel when there's a static charge built up on me, but it really doesn't happen very often, especially with the other precautions I take.

I've seen someone decap an IC after it got hit and killed by a good static shock. I assumed that if there was any damage visible, it would've just been on the chip die, but it looked like a few of the fine wires between the die and legs blew apart in addition to a burn mark on the die.

ESD damage to a dead IC was often easy to find. Del-lid it and look at it under magnification, the tell-tale craters at the whisker to die junction are easy to spot.

Most people don't feel a static discharge until it's well into the 2000+ volt range. MOS devices can often be damaged by voltages as low as 200V - well under human threshold of being able to feel it. MOS devices are usually low power devices and include 4000 series logic, memory (both RAM and 27C type EPROMs), many later versions of CPU/peripherals and Field Effect Transistors such as MOSFETs. BUT - many of these devices include a bit of internal ESD protection on the pins so that they're not as easy to destroy as the earlier devices. MOSFETs usually do not have this protection.

Thanks for the expanded explanation. I'm decent with electronics in the meathead kind of way, not the specific components.

don't listen to the wife and move them back to where they were safe !

If I had to deal with that situation I would use an esd strap when working with the circuit cards and if I had a bench there I would have an esd mat so I could work on the circuit cards in that situation. The least you could do if machines are grounded is touch ground and ensure any static is discharged before working on a machine. A little precaution is better then having to change a chip. A walking wounded chip as stated above will cause some of the most weird difficult intermittent problems that take hours to diagnose