Waits measured in minutes

Work that has to finish before an answer can exist

A wait holds you at the keyboard when something real is being done in the meantime, and when that something is the kind of work that ends. That is the whole difference from the band below. In the seconds band the answer already exists and only has to travel. Here it is being made while you look at the place where it will appear.

The making takes several forms. A route through the network has to be assembled out of relays that have never carried your traffic before. A queue at the door has to move down as far as your position in it. A record has to be written somewhere and then read back. A payment has to be picked up by a network that does its work in batches on a rhythm of its own and has no idea anyone is watching. In each case there is a process with a beginning and an end, and you have arrived somewhere in the middle of it.

There is a second family here that is easy to overlook, because it does not look like work at all. Some of these waits are deliberate. A door that holds everybody for a stretch before letting them through is doing something on purpose, and so is a lockout that follows a run of failed attempts. From your side those are indistinguishable from slowness. From the mechanism side they are the opposite of slowness: they are a service refusing to be hurried, and the refusal is the feature.

Because the work is real, it has a real order, and that order does not survive interruption. Stopping it does not pause it in place. It generally throws it away. That single fact shapes everything else on this page, and it is the reason this is the band where doing nothing is most often the correct action rather than merely the patient one.

Retrying, and what it costs

The mistake that defines this band is the retry. It is an entirely reasonable reflex, because in ordinary computing a retry is close to free, and most people have years of experience of it working. Here the economics are different, and they are different in a way nothing on the screen tells you about.

• Reloading while a route is being assembled abandons the half built route and asks for another one from scratch, so the progress you were waiting on is gone and a fresh attempt begins. See building another circuit.
• Submitting an order a second time does not replace the first attempt. It can create a second one alongside it, and now there are two things to untangle where there had been one. See the order going through.
• Failing a sign in repeatedly can start a cooldown after failed tries, which is a wait you added to your own evening by trying to shorten a shorter one.
• Sending a payment again because a balance has not moved yet is the most expensive retry available on the whole site, because the first one is still on its way and nothing recalls it. See the balance catching up.

The cost is not spread evenly. Some retries only waste your own patience, and those are forgivable. Some create work that nobody can undo, and those are concentrated here rather than anywhere else on the site. When you cannot tell which kind you are looking at, treat it as the second kind, because the asymmetry is severe: waiting out a wait that was already finished costs you a short stretch of boredom, while restarting a wait that was nearly finished costs you the whole of it again.

Every wait that keeps you at the keyboard

The cards below are the ones where the keyboard is still the right place to be. Every one names what is being built, queued or written while the screen holds still, and every one says explicitly whether asking again is harmless or destructive, because that is the only decision you actually have in front of you.

The two borders of this band

This band touches the shortest one below it and the evening band above it. Both borders are drawn on mechanism rather than on how impatient the wait makes you, which is why a wait can feel long and still belong lower down.

Downward, towards <a href="/seconds">seconds</a>

Nothing has to be constructed or queued. The thing you asked for exists already and has only to travel back. A search that comes back is a lookup, not a construction, and it belongs below no matter how slow the path is that day.

Upward, towards <a href="/evening">an evening</a>

The work stops depending on your machine and starts depending on somebody else. Once a person has to read something, or a network has to keep agreeing over and over rather than once, the end of the wait moves out of reach of a single sitting.

The awkward middle

A deposit is the clearest case on the site. A first confirmation on a deposit usually belongs here. A deposit reaching enough confirmations does not, because each further agreement is another wait of the same size stacked on the end of the last one, and stacking is what moves it up a band.

There is also a border this band shares with nothing at all, which is the border with your own tolerance. A wait can be correctly filed here and still feel intolerable, usually because it arrived at the end of a run of other waits rather than on its own. That feeling is real and it is not evidence. The card for a wait describes the mechanism behind it, and the mechanism does not know how your afternoon has gone.

If you cannot decide which side of a border a wait falls on, ask what would actually make it finish sooner. When the honest answer is something you could do at the keyboard, the wait is almost certainly in this band. When the honest answer is another party doing something in their own time, put the machine down and read the evening band instead.