The year is 2005 and I just started working for Siemens Automotive VDO (defunct now, Siemens sold it's automotive division meanwhile) and I got "shipped" directly to work for the immobilizer for Mazda RX8, 2nd edition (goal year to be on the market was set at 2007). Now, while on hardware test room, the room where you would get your code, burn it on a flash simulator that would be the final BCM (Body Control Module) board unit and start testing, I had also to connect to all the sensors (internal lights, screen wipers, tire-guard, etc) via CAN (Controlled Area Network). These CAN's were simple chips that you simply plug into a socket, pretty much the way you plug your CPU on motherboard in a PC. And you would handle them with your hands, right? Well, at least that I saw everybody doing it. So I did it also. And none of them worked. Dead. In the water. NULL. After trying a dozen, asked one of the adjacent guys, that was working on another feature for the same BCM - "wtf is going on? why none is working?". So he came to my test table, put his hand on the heater pipe from the wall, grabbed one from the box of "virgin' ones, teared the plastic bag, fished out, place it on the socket and magic happened. It worked. I asked, why did he put his hand on the heater pipe? He said to get rid of electrostatic charge in order not to damage the CAN chip. And looking at the dozen that I already damaged, smiled and said: "did you know that each is costing 5000 (yes thousands) EURO?"
Told him that of course I knew about electrostatic charge, but that was a problem with '80 / early '90 CMOS / NMOS, later all had buffers to prevent this from happening. He's reply was: "You're absolutely correct 100%, and this CAN is the actual prototype design from 1992 when Siemens invented the immobilizer feature and they continued to manufacture it internally using the same CMOS / NMOS from 1992. Hence the electrostatic charge killing them. In the final shipping of the BCM module we have another one which is costing us only 150 EURO to produce and has all those buffers included". And he shrugged his shoulders when I asked why those were not shipped to us.
Corporations work in mysterious ways, that was my conclusion.