Consider a typical phone conversation to let someone know, that even though you are running a little late, you are almost to the place where you are meeting them:
Guy0: “Hello”
Guy1: “Hello”
Guy0: “Hey it’s me”
Guy1: “Hey man”
Guy0: “I am almost there, caught in traffic”
Guy1: “Ok cool”
Guy0: “Ok, then, see you in a few, later”
Guy1: “bye”
Now the text message that conveys the same information:
Guy0: ‘almost there’
Awesome. That’s perfect.
The whole “hey, it’s me” comment that almost everyone says at the beginning of phone conversations kills me. It even hurts more knowing that I do it sometimes too.
In Brave New World (at least, the movie – never read the book) they compressed the standard conversation boilerplate into “HellohowareyouI’mfinethankyouverymuch” and then launched into the conversation.
I’ve always thought of things like hello and goodbye as conversation tags. There’s an XML spec for everything, you see…
Bill, Yeah, I am guilty as well. I do it a lot actually and I know it’s useless.
Human, I only allow disparaging comments about XML on my blog.