Handshaking protocols

The visitor arrives at the Virtual Center.

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Supervisor: Find your way all right?

Visitor: Something of a journey of uncertainty. But I’m here. Nice office.

Supervisor: I feel lucky to have it. It’s a new building. I thought we’d begin by going upstairs and you can meet Carl. His unit handles the machine translation coding.

Visitor: Sounds fine.

Supervisor: In here. This is Virtual Carl, he handles the translation side of things. He’s working on a modification to Unicode. He can tell more about what this unit does.

Visitor: Virtual Carl. Nice to meet you.

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Voice-over

Getting to the point when introducing people who share an interest but have never met can follow a simple protocol to establish a connection. Something like fax machines or computer modems beeping at each other to establish connection speed, coding, interrupting procedures, etc.

In this case, the supervisor uses a location, identity, task, wh3 approach:

Where (“In here”),

Who (“This is…”),

What (“he handles…” and “he’s working on…”).

“He can tell you…” is the handover for the drill-down phase into the detail substrata.

Interesting that stories of the future (eg scifi) generally still have humans using present-day lexis, grammar and pragmatics. For an example, read the script of 2001 A Space Odyssey.

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