binary magic

She cocked her head most adorably and, with a voice bursting with disbelief and exhilaration, cried out, "Do you want to see the place where I'm from?"

Of course! When a woman poses this kind of question, things are normally going exceptionally well. The minefield of probing platitudes and meaningless mutter has been safely crossed and we're getting somewhere. We might even be on the way to her place, now that she mentions it. But this was no second date.

I was standing at the reception of the SAF building, slightly out of breath after running over there from my bench. I had to send some samples off for sequencing, and the DHL man comes by at half past three every day. It was 3:28. The envelope was still there, half full with other scientists' work. I stuffed my little bag inside and turned around to head back to the lab to start the last purification of the week, when the curious question was thrown at me from behind the reception desk. The accent was adorable, but the woman the age of my mom.

She wasn't flirting either. No, she had just been made aware of Google's Street View and the urge to share the magic was unsuppressible. Looking at the home of her youth in a dapper neighborhood of Prague, she couldn't keep the joy to herself. "Look," she said with the sparkle of incredulous delight in her eyes, "this was my home. We used to sled down this street in winter."

I could have told her that Street View is years old, eternities even in the fast-paced world of the internet. I could have told her that I've been there and seen that, and that my previous house is still obscured by a red double-decker bus. I could have told her that angry farmers in Austria have just wrecked a Google van with pick-axes. Any of this would have been malicious, but it wouldn't have had an effect.

The receptionist was enraptured by the magic bursting from the screen in front of her. She didn't pay attention to what I said, and in some ways I envied her. The photos transported her back to her childhood, completely. She became a small girl, looking with absolute wonderment at the sparkling lights on the Christmas tree or the colorful kite in the air whose line she was holding despite the better knowledge that sticks and paper don't fly.

Maybe a few decades from now I'll be just the same, bubbling with blistering thrill at the discovery of something profoundly impossible and foisting my delight upon the first person to walk by my desk. Maybe I'll rediscover the magic, but for now I expect everything when I turn my computer on, and if something new amazes me, my reaction is more often than not a jaded, Why has it taken so long.