Static Electricity causing Aluminum Shelled Notebooks to freeze??

Once in awhile, when I come back to my computer, I get "shocked" by the aluminum body of my MacBook Pro (just for the record, this has happened to me too since the Titanium and the previous [same design] Powerbook) .... and it'll freeze the OS.
Nothing moves, and I have to hard restart.
Does this happen to anyone else? It seems like it happens when the static discharges on the trackpad.
What is up with this???

When using my PowerBook G4, I sometimes feel the zap of static electricity when I first touch it...and if my finger was close enough to the trackpad, the zap 'stuns' the trackpad for several seconds. It's difficult to move the cursor very far. After several seconds the responsiveness returns and everything is normal. This is with the factory power supply and either the two prong adapter or cable with grounded plug.
Also my Mac Pro (and my previous machine, a PowerMac G5) seems susceptible to static. Apparently my desk chair builds up a charge when I'm sitting at the computer for long periods and if I put the computer to sleep and then get out of the chair, the computer wakes back up. My G5 did the exact same thing. The other morning it was particularly cold and I draped a shirt over the back of my chair and the static from that woke the computer. As I walked into the room I could feel the shirt crackling and raising the hair on my arm.
The Mac Pro has a grounded plug, but the machine is sitting on a carpeted floor under my desk... I've been wondering if I should find a mat or something to put it on.
Crazy, huh?

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