This site is a register, not a manual. Each entry is one thing you wait for, and the entries are filed by how long the wait lasts rather than by subject. That means a card about money can sit next to a card about a picture failing to load, because what they have in common is the shape of the silence, not the topic.
A register only works if the entries are the same shape. Every card here answers the same six things in the same order. You can read a card straight through, or you can jump to the one heading you came for and leave.
The six headings
- The band
- A single word or phrase at the top of the card: seconds, minutes, an evening, days, or open-ended. It is not a prediction about your particular case. It is the range the mechanism can produce without anything having gone wrong. Underneath it sits one sentence arguing why the wait lands in that band and not in the one above it.
- The wait, in plain words
- What you are actually waiting for, stated without jargon. This exists because a lot of waiting is made worse by not knowing which of several things is happening. A person watching a stalled screen is often waiting for something quite different from what they think.
- Underneath, while nothing moves
- The mechanism. What is being done on your behalf while the screen shows you nothing. This is the section that decides everything else. A wait you understand is a wait you can size, and a wait you can size is one you can leave alone.
- Behaving, and not behaving
- Two columns. On the left, what a normal instance of this wait looks like. On the right, what the same wait looks like when it has gone wrong. Underneath, the thing that distinguishes them, which is usually not duration.
- Safe to do meanwhile
- Things you can do that will not cost you anything, and in a few cases things that are genuinely worth doing while you have the time. Some waits come with real work attached, and doing that work during the wait is free.
- What makes it longer
- The other half. Actions that extend the wait, restart it, or convert it into a worse one. This is the section most people need and least expect, because the instinct during a wait is to act, and acting is frequently what resets the clock.
The line at the bottom
Every card closes with one sentence saying what the card is not. It is there because a page about a wait is easily mistaken for a page about a fault, and a page about a fault is easily mistaken for a page that can fix it. None of these cards can fix anything. They can tell you whether to keep looking at the screen.
That closing line is also where a card declines things. Several waits on this site touch subjects the site will not cover, and the honest move is to say so on the card rather than to write around it.
What the bands are not
A band is a range argued from how a thing works, not a measurement. Nothing here has been timed. There is no data set behind this site, and if there were one it would be a data set about somebody else on a different network at a different hour.
So a card in the minutes band is not promising you minutes. It is saying that the mechanism underneath is a round trip plus some work on a server, and that a mechanism of that shape does not usually take an evening. If it does take an evening for you, the band has not failed. Your case has left the band, and the second column of the fourth section is where you should be looking.
Where the bands come from sets out the reasoning in full, and why there are no numbers explains the refusal to be more precise than the evidence allows.
How to use the register
- Start from the bandIf you know roughly how long you have been waiting, the register is sorted for you.
- Start from the runIf you want the whole set laid end to end, shortest first.
- Start from the screenIf something is not moving right now, the shortest band is where most screens belong.
- Start from the moneyPayment waits are stacked, and the first one is not the one that credits you.
Where a card stops
A card describes a wait and ends. It does not walk you through a task from beginning to end, and it does not tell you what to buy, from whom, or how. Several waits on this site sit next to subjects this site does not write about, and the card will say so and stop.
The cards also avoid telling you that anything is currently working. Nothing here opens either of the two published addresses, so nothing here is in a position to say what happens if you do. That restraint matters more on this site than on most, because a site about waiting could very easily be mistaken for a site that is watching something on your behalf. It is not.
What this card is not. This page is not a summary of the cards. It is the key to their layout, and the cards themselves are where the content lives.