It's pretty crazy that the sales guy was able to connect the water cooling and power with enough hosing and cables to bring it outside, as well as know how to operate the device enough to activate it - but couldn't correctly point it _at the ground_ and burn the paint off of the street without melting through a car.
But forgetting that, what are the core safety issues described? I get the direct exposure to unprotected eyes damage, but there's discussion of infra red reflections endangering nearby children + aircraft + casus belli with the US army.
The story says he did point it at the ground, but a) it was reflecting off the reflective paint they were aiming at and b) towards the end the laser was badly misaligned.
Not operating in a controlled environment, no curtains to block stray reflections, not ensuring your optic path is stable and clear of obstructions and reflective objects. Doesn’t sound like they had a beam block around for safety, nor did they first use a lower power visible laser to simulate beam path.
These types of lasers are integrated into end customer systems by techs at a factory. They are very simple to setup from the black box level of understanding. All you do is plug in water (blue hose in and red hose for out) since the electrical system is typical a box that simply plugs into the laser head and the wall outlet. The only factor that could affect the output power that's not on the controls would be the water temperature.
“Sales engineer” sounds like one of those positions that would be regularly setting up demos for customers and have access to the equipment and basic operating procedures.
“Could we use this to burn paint off the road” sounds exactly like the sort of question a person doing a demo might say “I don’t see why not, let’s try it” to.
While with deliberate thought about it, the fact that road markings are retro-reflective is obvious, but it’s not something you would necessarily consider immediately, since it’s called “paint” and almost all paint you encounter in the world is not retro-reflective.
For the rest of it, my reading of the story is multiple things happened here:
1) They initially aimed the IR laser at the paint on the ground. The paint being retro-reflective the laser damaged itself in about an half hour and stopped producing consistent results, just occasional spots of results.
2) The sales person rather than halting the demo to get someone else to take a look at what was malfunctioning continued to fire the laser after making various adjustments not realizing that because the laser had been damaged it was firing not at the ground anymore, but at the car a few spaces away.
3) They’d been messing with the laser after malfunctioning since before the VP parked their car, so there’s possibility they were sending lasers in the direction of the other building, so that’s one issue which would have been bad enough on its own but…
4) At some point the VP parked their car in the path between the laser and the building. As they continued to mess with the malfunctioning laser, they burned through the paint on the side of the car, exposing the bare metal underneath.
5) The bare metal is also highly reflective, but because it’s not retro-reflective the problem is now you had completely uncontrolled reflections. The ones that went backwards had nothing to stop them since there was only a fence and field between the lot and the school. And the ones that went up obviously also had nothing to stop them since they were outside.
6) Because of the unknown detections and quantity of reflection, in addition to getting all the potentially exposed employees and customers checked out, the company would also have to make advisory calls (at a minimum) to the school and the local airports and military installations.
Whether those schools and planes were actually in danger or not could not be said with certainty, but the point was less “oh know we’re terrorists now” and more “this was a huge screw up, and I need to impress on you why it was bigger than just breaking company property or not wearing your safety gear”
I think this is all a good illustration of why "Bob" was (supposedly) fired at the end of the story.
A good sales engineer knows a lot about the product within its normal operating envelope, but especially knows a lot about the boundaries of "normal operation". Bob's very first response to "can this thing do a thing [that Bob should know is outside of its normal operations]?" should have been to go ask the kind of engineer who is involved in defining "normal". And either the capability is investigated (and, if plausible, eventually a "safe" demo is put together, and maybe the definition of "normal" is expanded), or its revealed that it won't work, and that's that. In either case, the rest of the situation never happens, provided Bob is actually good at the engineering side of "sales engineer".
But forgetting that, what are the core safety issues described? I get the direct exposure to unprotected eyes damage, but there's discussion of infra red reflections endangering nearby children + aircraft + casus belli with the US army.