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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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