yeah did my nut in too, but apparently, year 9 is the year before the gcse years.
the gcse years being 10 and 11
12 and 13 being lower and upper 6th form.
anyway, back on topic,
thinking about it, it was fairly amazing i didn't cook any CIAs the amount of hot plugging i used to do. even scsi devices. i'm a bit more carefull these days though. its not like A500's are still in production :-D
i found you can reset a miggy by hot plugging the 23pin video port and getting it wrong by shorting one of the pins to ground with the plug shielding. even scared myself and got a blue spark one day, but the miggy carried on like nothing had happened. no speed boost or anything either though.. (blue sparks - mario kart, badoom tish...)
still took care grounding out static, but not so far as to wear an anti-static wrist strap ;-)