Instead of dealing with my mounting e-mail backlog, I helped RK set up the playing card game along the red-carpeted corridor at work. We laid the enormous cardboard figures of the jacks, queens and kings flat over black plastic sheeting, then attached the sensors to the floor. Each card would spring up whenever anyone who walked by hit a sensor.

Two students came along and suggested that it would be fun to wear a disguise of black bin liner and hide next to the upright cards, thus bringing them to life for those who participated in the game. Then one said that he even wanted to swim across a lake dressed in a card to attend his island graduation ceremony. “How very silly” I muttered to myself.