Oh man, that reminds me of a mistake I made a few years back.

I had opened up a motor controller to fix it, and I knew to discharge the cap before messing around inside. I applied a screwdriver across the terminals to short it out, and was rewarded with a beautiful long and skinny arc as the screwdriver came into contact. I said out loud, "That was cool", and my coworker sitting behind me said, "What was cool"? I told him that I had just shorted out the cap and the arc looked really cool. So he said, "Can you show me?" I said sure, and plugged the controller in for a few seconds to recharge it, then unplugged it and proceeded to repeat what I had just done.

What I had forgotten was that previously the motor controller had been unplugged overnight. When I touched the screwdriver to the freshly charged capacitor, there was a boom, a three inch fireball, and the end of the screwdriver was completely gone. As I sat there thunderstruck, my coworker said, "You're right. That was pretty cool".

Well, your comment was my deep laugh for the day. excellent story. When I was younger, I saw my father working on a ceiling fan...while it was on. I asked him why he did not flip the breaker first and he said "well, as long as you don't touch both wires at the same time, you'll be fine "

Fast forward a few days later I am at school, and I see in one of the outlets one of the prongs for a power cable had broken off in it. I remembered his advice about not touching both sides and proceeded to try and pull it out using my fingers...you can probably imagine what happened. It grabbed hold of me for a few seconds and a lesson was learned.

In theory, if you were wearing rubber shoes and not touching any other path to ground, you would have been fine.

I think supporting myself by holding the metal of one of those school desks was a factor possibly.

Ideally you’d short a run cap with a suitable resistor, but you’re right, short the cap right after de-energizing the motor circuit before touching it with your hands.

Yeah, I try to bleed it with a long-handle screwdriver for 30 seconds. In fact, the couple times I've managed to zap myself was with residual current even after that, so I can't imagine what the full potential is. It's just a no-fun job.