7 ms·
I’m not saying it didn’t happen as described, but this really kinda reads like the “Bald eagle named Albert Einstein flew into the classroom” copypasta…
by zoky 2y ago
I’m not saying it didn’t happen as described, but this really kinda reads like the “Bald eagle named Albert Einstein flew into the classroom” copypasta…
- fennecbutt 2y agoIt's written in the style of tales from tech support.
- mpalmer 2y agoNever let facts get in the way of a good story. The build-up is great (VP's car, elementary school, military base) and the punchline is funny, but it's just a bit too perfect ("and what's above us?", cue clouds). Even the name Bob sounds like it's been chosen for comedy. It's clearly a mostly true story that's been refined and polished over the years.
- rob74 2y agoIt's entirely possible that "Bob" is a generic name (using $SALES_GUY, like he uses $LASER_COMPANY and $FACILITY_GUY, would have been too repetitive). ...or the guy was really called Bob.
- trelane 2y agoAlso, the guy had enough happen to him. He doesn't need his actual name put in the story. One might hope that in the intervening 25 years he would have improved, especially after such an expensive lesson.
- foehrenwald 2y agoreads like a BOFH story
- gadders 2y agoYeah, I thought it sounded a bit too good to be true as well...
- cududa 2y agoWas curious so I looked it up - Jose Antonio Vargas Elementary School is right by Moffet Field. The school also abuts an industrial park that fits the description. One of the current tenants there is Volvo Innovation Lab, which I imagine does laser testing. I have no idea if buildings need certain certifications for working with lasers, so I mention that tidbit. As well, that office park has 16 buildings in it, by my count. The pieces of this story very much so line up.
- mpalmer 2y agoYeah like I said I'm sure it's mostly true. I just don't necessarily buy that he had a comedian's delivery on the day in question
- relaxing 2y agoThe sales guy set up the entire rig on his own? And no other engineers in the lab stopped to ask what he was doing? I know some places have poor safety culture, but this is a “laser company”. Basic laser safety should be drilled into them from day 1 and every day after. When I worked in an optics lab, we had interlocks on the doors that switched on with the power supply running the experiment and a sign outside indicating which wavelengths were operating.
- mike50 2y agoThe structure of the industry is many small companies that make one specific laser based on the owner's PhD research. These companies cannot have the perfect safety culture simply due to staffing numbers.
- ben_w 2y agoMm. Should be, isn't. I've heard of one place that had a class IV laser mounted on a robot arm in a public area, which turned itself off when the arm happened to flail in exactly the right way to hit its own emergency stop button.
- ta988 2y agoI have seen a drunk employee wrestling with a moving industrial robotic arm trying to "fix it" after having disabled the numerous safeties with screwdrivers. This was at a major car manufacturer plant. Do not underestimate the horrible situations people can put themselves in.
- p_l 2y agoSometimes you fight and curse the volkswagen-special VKRC safety circuits. And sometimes you think what kind of shenanigans might happen and why it might be better to have complex safety interlocks that mate with entire automation cell controls...
- hotsauceror 2y agoA relative of mine works with assembly-line robots at heavy equipment manufacturers. He told me that while they were calibrating a new robot that was used to move axles for industrial mining dump trucks, a miscalculation caused the robot to fling a 800 lb axle through the air like a marching band baton.
- gus_massa 2y agoI worked for a few weeks in a class with a custom infrared -> green laser. The teacher were very hard about glasses, how to crouch looking away from the laser table, close the door and a few more security measures. And later, I had a 5W (0.5W?) green laser at 3 yards pointed at me [1] with some optical equipment bolted to the table in the middle so there was (almost) no possibility that it hit me. The story sounds real. [1] If all the bolted devices in the middle magically fall down, the laser would have hit my belly, not my eyes. So it's important to crouch looking away, just in case.
- aj7 2y agoCrouch? When training technicians, the first thing is, you never ever bend your waist in the laser room, with lasers on. Your head never enters the plane of the laser beams. You do not put your ahead above the laser. You use a piece of copy paper to earache for stray beams near the apparatus. You use an IR viewer to (shock yourself as to how many there are to) find 1064nm stray beams.
- gus_massa 2y agoI agree. I'm not a native English speaker, so I may have choose the wrong verb. Is "squatting" better? And with that kind of care, like turn everything off and still be very careful if you have to pick something from the floor.
- amluto 2y ago> custom infrared -> green laser Nd:YAG lasers always creep me out. I worked in a lab that had an Nd:YAG with two janky doublers: 1064 -> 532 -> 266 nm. The output energy was supposed to be a few mJ (IIRC), but it was basically zero. So the students operating it took off the second doubler and fired it at a bookend. Nothing (well, nothing visible). Took off the first doubler. After investigation, the zapping sound was the paint vaporizing off a computer at the other end of the lab, because the beam was actually scooting just past the bookend. 1064 nm is almost the worst wavelength you can work with. (Okay, 233nm is probably worse, but the available energy with a setup like this is much lower.) I have a green laser pointer, and I made a point of buying a diode laser. It’s a slightly different color than 532, its battery life is better, but, critically, there is no way it could malfunction or be sloppily constructed to leak infrared light.
- fsh 2y agoYeah, the story contains some obvious bullshit. There is no way in hell a flashlamp-pumped Nd:YAG laser could cut through a piece of steel. With typical ~Hz repetition rate and ~J pulse energy, the average power is only around 1 W. This is three to five orders of magnitude lower than typical welding lasers. This could burn some paint or engrave metal, but burning through a wheel well and brake line is completely ridiculous.
- mistercow 2y agoMaybe they meant the plastic wheel well liner? I don’t know if that makes sense, I’m just googling around looking at Jeep Cherokee images.
- actionfromafar 2y agoIt's just there for flair. :)
- xiphmont 2y agoHe didn't claim it cut through steel, JGCs have polymer wheel wells and brake lines like most modern cars.
- neilv 2y agoAs I read through it, it does sound like an apocryphal old story, since too many of the details are too perfect setups for the teller. Then again, occasionally real life really does happen unbelieveably, including when fudge-ups are involved. Maybe what's most unbelieveable is that, to the extent the story tells, the only known injured person was the laser safety officer. Presumably the safety person was partly in the loop on some other injuries, but maybe they're NDA'd on that, yet not NDA'd on mentioning the incident. Or, maybe an incident like that was kept very quiet by a company, and injured people never knew how they got injured. Then there's this: > 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. Did they only give verbal reports and verbal depositions/testimony? Never wrote up a report for internal use or for professional publication? "Laughs over cocktails" could mean finding humor in the ridiculousness of disaster, and taking a battle scar in stride. Could also be a hint that the entire story is a fabricated/embellished/appropriated story, like people often tell recreationally when drinking, and understood in that context for what it is.
- kragen 2y agopossibly his boss asked him to not write up the report
- neilv 2y agoYes, I don't want to speculate, but would hope that, for whatever happened, the affected people were notified, and all the appropriate safety officer processes were followed up on. Or, the story might have started a bit like when grandkids ask grandpa how he got that arm injury, and instead of telling the troubling story about shrapnel in the war, or the car crash, he tongue in cheek tells a fantastic tall tale of fishing, when along comes a bear who wanted to eat his fish, chock full of lessons. That could've been a goal with students: if one ran out of real-world case studies to drive home laser safety practices, a semi-plausible, if over-the-top, narrative of how a not-unlikely cavalier mistake could become a clusterfudge, with the story of course hitting all the safety practices they were just told about. There would normally be verbal cues as to the kind of story, and there'd be the context of telling, both of which are lost in blog posts.
- gibspaulding 2y agoIt reads like most Funranium Labs posts. Here are some other good ones: https://www.funraniumlabs.com/2015/04/an-april-fools-cautionary-tale/ https://www.funraniumlabs.com/2015/04/an-april-fools-caution... https://www.funraniumlabs.com/2018/09/the-fringes-of-regulation/ https://www.funraniumlabs.com/2018/09/the-fringes-of-regulat...