Discharging a VT100 CRT (Bob Bradlee)

As someone who has worked on TV's since the 1960's, and who worked as an engineer in TV stations for many years, I think you are being paranoid and getting far too worked up over nothing. Connect an alligator clip from the metal blade of a (normal) screwdriver (with a plastic handle) to ground (normally, chassis ground is also grounded to the aquadag conductive coating on the outside of the CRT). Stick the blade under the 2nd anode cap and touch the actual 2nd anode connector. Yes, use only one hand. There may or may not be a spark, which you may or may not hear. Leave it connected for a second or two, wait a second or two and do it again or even 2 more times. If you want to use a resistor in series with the ground lead, fine, I rarely do and have never damaged anything (and many of the CRTs I've worked on are a lot bigger and have a lot more voltage than any monochrome computer monitor), but it's not a bad idea. However, don't go overboard on the value of the resistor. You do not want "tens or hundreds of megohms", it would take too long to discharge the voltage. There is only about 10,000 volts or so on a 9" to 12" monochrome CRT (compared to more like 30,000 volts on a large screen color CRT), so a one megohm resistor will limit the current to 10 ma. If you do use a resistor, always do a final discharge without a resistor. Also, if the unit has not been powered up in weeks or months, there probably isn't anything there to begin with, although this would depend on the design and components of the individual unit in question.