[EDIT for Clarification]
...I sharpen them sparingly now to keep these last few alive as long as possible, and to dampen their taste for blood a little.
[[/EDIT]
mnem
"Oww... oww... owwdammit OWWW!" ~ me, more than once.
Yeah, same, after purchasing a couple sets of ProbeMaster DMM probes.
Similar taste for blood to mine, or cost?
The ProbeMasters seem comparable in price, quality for quality, to Fluke's offerings. Fluke of course is not cheap, but they're made to stand up to mechanics and assembly line workers and maybe even management-types.
Though for a good, rugged everyday set of leads on a field meter, the Fluke TL175s are a bargain; for the last 20 years you can get them at any Fry's for ~ $20 and they are damn near bulletproof. Plus the slide-out tip sheaths are a godsend when you're standing on a ladder and poking around in a live machinery control panel that may have 440V right next to the 5-24V stuff you're troubleshooting.
I recently got a pair of Pomona itty bitties with pogo tips that should be just the ticket if I ever have to extract information from people rather than circuitry. Just hook them up to the PSU instead of the meter. I've already had one up a finger nail, when they do finally lose grip you're exerting a fair amount of force. I'd confess to the Great Train Robbery rather than have that happen again.
Oh, my preferred "Terror object Number 7" is hanging on the wall... and I have multiple ready sources of 10-40KV to go with it; some even battery powered.
Watch out for naked telecom glass fibres: they insert themselves and then break off. If you are lucky it emerges a few weeks later of it own accord.
*PTSD cringe, remembering similar evils suffered at the hands of carbon fiber rod used in RC aircraft*
My personal worst test probe bugbear would have to be working with bed-of-nails test fixtures like these. While most such jigs have pins that won't bottom out with exposed points, making it hard to actually impale yourself, what they WILL do is slice the everlovin' HELL out of a forearm dragged across them, making it look (and feel, once the cuts inevitably get infected before they heal) like you lost a skirmish with a wolverine. Worse yet, if you drag your arm across them at just the right angle, you can make them bind up enough that dozens of them do poke into you about 1/4" or so deep.
mnem
Say "Hi" to the Probulator, boys and girls.