It has been brought to my attention that I have never actually written this story down before, merely told it in person to many students for valuable lessons and also for laughs over cocktails. It is a litany of bad ideas from several people that all came together at once to reach out and zap me.
DISCLAIMER FOR THE SQUEAMISH: My eyes and vision are fine. There was some slight retinal bleaching in the peripheral vision of my right eye. If I hold up a large plane of white paper in front of me, like when helping a friend make posters for Ren Faire, there’s a small patch of yellowish tint in the lower right corner. Not a big deal, but damage is damage.
[Scene – A very overcast morning in the spring of 1999. Exterior driveway between Building 6 & 15 of $LASER_COMPANY, roughly 10am]
It was a day much like any other in my four years, five months and eighteen days of working there, not that I was counting or anything. After checking on a couple laser labs and talking to people, I needed to go across the way to visit the optics coating facility. So, I walked out the side door of Building 6 to cross the driveway, go down the stairs and over to the loading dock of Building 15. As I was walking across the driveway, I heard a weird noise. Something was rhythmically clicking away a bit faster than once a second. My thought process went a bit like this.
Me: What is that noise?
Me [a few seconds later]: Ohhhhh, I know that noise. That’s the flashlamps of a Quanta-Ray system going off.
Me [immediately after, spinning on my heels to head toward the source of the sound]: Why am I hearing this outside?
It was at some point while walking that way and waving my hands and yelling “SHUT IT DOWN!!!” that I took my laser hit from a scattered, fractional beam from the shenanigans going on (I didn’t notice the damage from the hit until several months later). I am going to try to describe what I saw in enough detail that hopefully you can reconstruct the scene in your head, because I don’t want to use my non-existent art skill in Paint to draw this.
The back of Building 6 had their shipping and receiving area and the rear parking lot. In the parking spaces closest to the shipping & receiving area, several spaces had been taken up by a Quanta-Ray’s power supply, a Rubbermaid cart with a large Quanta-Ray laser balanced on it, and it was connected to some Caltrans utility trailer looking contraption downstream and in line with the output aperture of the laser. Beyond the contraption trailer was a VP of Sales’ brand new cherry red Jeep Grand Cherokee. There were umbilicals for chilled water and power running across the parking lot back into the loading dock. Three men are standing behind the laser with another rolling cart being used as moveable workbench, fiddling with the controls for the laser and the contraption it was connected to on the trailer. Two of them were wearing laser safety eyewear. The third, one of our sales engineers who is named Bob, was not wearing any.
After making sure everything was shut down, I assessed the scene and realized something had gone wrong beyond simply “this entire situation”. This was a sales demo for prospective customers gone horribly awry. I identified myself as the Laser Safety Officer and that I had some questions. The customers looked very much like they wanted to be anywhere but here.
Me: May I see your glasses?
[Customers 1 & 2 hand me them]
Me: These are argon filters. Are these your glasses at you brought with you?
Customer 1: Yes.
Me: Shame you’re working with a Nd:YAG laser, not an argon one.
Customer 2: Better than nothing, right?
Me: These are utterly useless at 1064nm. You both should go make appointments with your ophthalmologists. But at least you understood that you need gogs. Bob, where are yours?
Bob: In the lab.
Me: Would that be the lab that this laser was in before you wheeled it outside?
Bob: Yes.
Me: Bob, why is this laser outside? What are you even doing here?
Customer 1: You see, we had an idea…
I want to say that, on first blush, their idea was admirable. They were trying to come up with a less destructive way to remove striping from roadways. You have to grind that stuff off, which damages the road surface, leading to increased wear & tear and thus potholes. Their solution was to do it with a laser instead.
Me: Let me see if I understand this right. You want to mount a high power laser on a cart, towed by a Caltrans or contractor truck, to burn the striping off roads?
Customer 1: Yes, ingenious isn’t it?
Me: The striping with REFLECTIVE paint?
Customer 2 [looks with concern at Customer 1]: Umm.
Me: I’m sure you can find a way with enough power.
Customer 1: But look, it worked!
The customer motioned for me to look at the parking lot space stripe that a whole bunch of of round spots on it which had, indeed, burnt the paint off the asphalt.
Me: Bob, $FACILITIES_GUY is going to kill you. He just repaved and striped this parking lot a couple of weeks ago.
Bob: [looks morose, as he’s starting to get an inkling of how bad this looks]
Me: But you’ve been having some trouble, haven’t you?
Customer 1 [surprised]: Yes! We can’t get beam no matter what we do.
Me: That’s because you’ve blown the coating on one of your steering optics.
Customer 1 & 2: How do you know?
Me: Because your beam is not being steered to raster the stripe on the ground. Instead, it’s been firing a flat beam forward and doing a raster scan of [gestures] that Grand Cherokee.
Bob and Customer 1 & 2 looked up to see the stripe of exposed metal on the door of the VP of Sales’ car where the paint had been burnt away. On closer inspection, we later leaned that the Quanta-Ray had burnt through the wheel well and cut the brake line. At this point, I decided I want to really rub in what a terrible idea all this was to them. How they had failed on so many levels.
Me: That’s $VP_of_Sales’ car, isn’t it Bob?
Bob: [groans] Yes.
Me: Pretty sure that’s your boss, Bob.
Bob: Yeah.
Me: When did you start doing this?
Customer 1: Around 8am.
Me: And when did you start having problems?
Customer 1: 8:30ish, maybe?
Me: Ah, so you were lasing through break time. Bob, what’s behind the car?
Bob: Building 15.
Me: $VP_of_Sales doesn’t normally get here until after 9am and the roach coach always pulls up at the loading dock of Building 15 at 8:45. So, hopefully you were aiming above eye level for all the employees on break. Also, that exposed brushed steel on the Cherokee is a mirror for near-infrared, so you’ve been shining that beam right back at yourselves. You definitely should call your ophthalmologists. But what’s behind you, Bob?
Bob: The fence.
Me: What kind of fence is it?
Bob: Chain-link.
Me: So, not a solid fence then. What’s on the other side of the fence, Bob?
Bob: [now staring at the ground in shame] The elementary school.
Me: If you’re very lucky, recess happened before your optic failed but we’re still gonna have to send a letter to the school about a potential exposure. Of course, that brushed steel mirror isn’t flat, which means your reflections went all over. Bob, what’s above us?
Bob: [picking up where I was going] Planes.
Me: How many airports worth of airspace travels over us?
Bob: SFO, Oakland, San Jose, the tiny municipal ones.
Me: You forgot a really important one. Our neighbor, Moffett fucking Field. Firing a laser into military airspace is an act of war. Are you declaring war on the United States, Bob?
Bob: [stands silently]
Me: Bob, what else is above us?
Bob: [looks up] Clouds.
Because timing is the essence of comedy, that would be when it started to rain on the quarter million dollar laser system, destroying it. Bob no longer worked at $LASER_COMPANY two weeks later.
MORAL: Of all the bystanders you could injure, DO NOT HURT THE SAFETY PERSON.
~fin~