As 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.
> Did they only give verbal reports and verbal depositions/testimony? Never wrote up a report for internal use or for professional publication?
I read that line as being in the context of the authors blog. As in “I’ve referenced this here before, and told the story to people in person, but never written out the story here on my blog.” Not literally saying that this is the first time in history any part of this story was committed to some form of the written word.
Yes, 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.
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.