Thanks for sharing that story. This is the kind of stuff that makes me miss the old internet (personal stories about interesting stuff, told in blog format without any kind of social media hype-train angle) and gives me a great appreciation for the kind of nerdy shenanigans engineers used to do.

I read the first paragraph and immediately came to the conclusion the author wrote in the last paragraph before reading that far. Single-terminated switches do not work. End of story. The switch casing had to be grounding it.