The Hi, the Sigh, and the Async Dance

Hi.

Just that.

The message in its entirety. Or Good morning, if they’re feeling a bit expansive. Or often you get, Hello Zunaid bhai, which makes it somewhat worse, because now it’s personal and I still have no clue what’s going on.

Then: Nothing.

The text bubbles flicker  --  a little bit of hope. And then dies. Minutes pass. Often hours. And often, I have the receipts; the follow-up never arrives.

There is an entire graveyard on my WhatsApp of one Hi after another, on my phone, waiting eagerly for me to look up. I do look up. I may have been deep in the midst of doing something.

Perhaps some code that has started to do what I wanted it to do, a paragraph that I have finally extracted from my muse, a pitch deck in anticipation of launching a unicorn.

Just for a Hi. You know that feeling. Don’t say you don’t. Bear with me; this next bit gets a little technical. I have spent a major part of my life working with systems that intentionally interrupt.

In the early days of my coding career, some of the first lines I wrote were interrupt handlers for machines with less memory than this paragraph needs.

An interrupt tells the machine, stop what you are doing and tend to this. And ‘this’ is what’s called a payload. And a payload is always waiting; otherwise, why would you interrupt the machine? Hi is an interrupt with the payload missing.

You pay the full cost of the interrupt but none of the benefit of the message. For a while I filed this under bad manners and moved on.

Then, being apparently incapable of leaving a small annoyance alone (see: Mudi, tong, several lost evenings), I started wondering what is actually going on inside the head of a serial Hi-er. Because they are not, on the whole, rude people.

Many of them are lovely. Some of them are even related to me. They aren’t being rude. They’re being polite. For a room. But there is no room. You walk up to a colleague’s desk, you say Hi, and you wait.

Perfectly fine, normal.

Polite, even.

You wait for the other person to look up, because barging into the middle of someone’s sentence with your thing is rude, and everyone over the age of four knows it.

Hi.

Look-up. Then you talk. Handshake first, payload second. It’s been that way since we had desks.

Probably since we had caves. The serial Hi-er is running exactly that protocol.

Faithfully. Correctly, if this were a real room.

They’ve sent the Hi, and they are now waiting, patiently, courteously, possibly with a cup of tea, for me to look up. Except there is no look-up in Slack. Or WhatsApp. Nobody nods at a text box.

So they wait for a signal that will never come; I stare at a Hi that will never say more, and we each decide the other one is being weird. (A technical aside, for which I apologize to non-technical readers, and for which I do not apologize at all to technical ones: This is a stalled TCP handshake. SYN sent, the ACK never arrives, and the connection sits in limbo until something times out. Except nothing times out. That’s the human improvement on the design.)

Same-room is synchronous. You’re there, I’m there, Hi costs nothing because it resolves in half a second. Chat is asynchronous, and that is the entire point.

I write when it suits me, you read when it suits you, and nobody has to be anywhere at the same time as anybody. It is a wonderful arrangement, right up until someone runs the in-person handshake over it and turns a perfectly good queue back into a waiting room.

They say Hi and wait for me to look up. I do look up. They have no way of knowing that. So they wait, I wait, and the one thing that would end it, saying the thing, is the one thing nobody does.

So I say this with love, and with the weary patience of a man who has looked up for a great many His: Fix it.

The fix costs you nothing. Put the payload in the first message. “Hi, can you look at the Q3 deck before four?” One interruption, fully resolved, no follow-up required.

Skip the Hi entirely if you like. I promise I won’t tell your mother. And no, you absolutely don’t need “Good morning sir, I hope this message finds you well” either.

Your message found me. Mid-something. We’ve established that. If it’s actually urgent (the client is on the line, the demo is in ten minutes, and the login is broken), you do have a device for that.

It has been solving this exact problem since before Slack’s founders were born.

It’s called a phone. Pick it up.

You’ll get your look-up, in real time, with tone of voice included at no extra charge. (Even the phone has a protocol, mind you: “Hi, got two minutes?” and then you say the thing.

Same call. Not a Hi on Monday and the thing on Thursday.)

Hi isn’t a message. It’s a doorbell. Say the thing, or call. I might even pick up.

Dr. Zunaid Kazi is an AI researcher, entrepreneur, and opinionated raconteur with four decades in the field. He is the founder and CEO of Knowtomation AI, founder and CTO of Gofai, and writes about technology, work, and the occasional linguistic rabbit hole.