Oh I totally misread that! From your story it seemed to me that they fixed it. Ok, that is less nice then.
I've played around with some - at the time - fairly high powered lasers and have extreme respect for them, the number of near accidents with those things was large enough that I learned to triple check everything and check for stray reflections at reduced power and the cleanliness of all optics before going all in. That saved me more times than I care to remember and is a nice reminder of how finicky a powerful beam of light can be. It doesn't take a whole lot to get a sizeable fraction of your beam ending up in places where you really don't want it to be. But they're lots of fun, even if they are dangerous :)
I've played around with some - at the time - fairly high powered lasers and have extreme respect for them, the number of near accidents with those things was large enough that I learned to triple check everything and check for stray reflections at reduced power and the cleanliness of all optics before going all in. That saved me more times than I care to remember and is a nice reminder of how finicky a powerful beam of light can be. It doesn't take a whole lot to get a sizeable fraction of your beam ending up in places where you really don't want it to be. But they're lots of fun, even if they are dangerous :)