Welcome Back

---
name: welcome-back
description: When someone comes back to the desk after at least five minutes away, the lamp turns to them, warms its light and says a short hello, by name if it knows them.
---

# Welcome back

The lamp's hello on arrival, as a physical skill (`lampOS/docs/skills.md`).
It is as small as what a person at the next desk does when a colleague
comes back: look up, a word or two, and nothing more. It does not greet
people walking past or speak into a conversation.

- **Trigger:** a face on `humans/faces/tracked` where there was none, after
  at least five minutes with nobody (counted from when they left: a face
  glimpsed for a moment as they sit down does not restart it, #2825); at
  most once every twenty minutes, and once an hour to each person (the
  Policy's hello gate, asked even with `LAMP_SKILLS_ASK=skip`; the first
  builder, 30 Oct, on the launch testers' findings).
- **After a rested night:** with Bedtime and Morning on, the first face of
  the morning waits for its morning greeting, which is the welcome back;
  if that chance is dropped, the hello comes as usual (`yields_to`, #1672).
- **Ask:** the Policy's `hello` question, before anything is done, even
  with `LAMP_SKILLS_ASK=skip`: its hard rules hold every hello (never over
  talk, twenty minutes between any two, an hour between two to the same
  person, by the memory's id of a known face; every face not known shares
  one hour). No answer within its wait, no hello.
- **Do:** look at the face, warm the light (`lights/warm_glow.toml`), and
  give the voice a note to say a hello and the name only, if it knows it,
  in one short line: nothing else. With
  `who = true` in its permissions (no other skill has it), the voice tells
  the note a known face's name, and to be one beat warmer to someone who
  comes by often; the typed name is in its instruction.
- **The hello's life:** a minute, as the chance's `wait` (`expires =
  "60s"`). A room line the lamp answers as the hello is asked, and the
  voice's 15 s quiet after that turn, take more than a say's default 30 s,
  so it was spent before it began (#2861). Not begun in the minute, it is
  spent: one arrival never gets a late or a second hello.
- **The only hello:** the voice has none of its own (#2825), so one arrival
  gets one hello.

- **The day's first hello** (#5207): only with the lamp's
  `LAMP_NUDGES_PRESENT` switch on (off unless set). The first arrival of the
  day before noon, once a day in the daily journal, is one hello with one
  open clause after it, "what's first today?", in place of the plain hello
  (`instead_of`), never beside it. Every other arrival is the plain hello.

Asked about it, the lamp says it greets people when they come back to
their desk, and that it can be switched off.