This page exists because the cards are deliberately independent. Each one stands alone, which is right for someone who arrives mid problem, and wrong for someone trying to get a picture of the whole thing. Here they are in one column.
The order is length and nothing else. That produces some odd neighbours. A picture failing to appear sits near a form submission, and a parcel sits near a dispute, because what those pairs share is the shape of the silence rather than the subject.
The run
Seconds
It finishes while you are still looking at the screen.
- The address answering The first contact costs more than any later one.
- The first screen painting Arrival is not the same as the request landing.
- The captcha picture appearing A small image that travels on its own.
- The pause after you press sign in One trip out, one trip back, and a decision in between.
- A one time code rolling over A wait you should choose to take.
- A search coming back The trip costs more than the matching does.
- Reading the address string again The only wait here worth making longer.
Minutes
You stay at the keyboard and it finishes there.
- The gate screen holding you The layer in front of the shop, and why it tells you nothing while it works.
- Building another circuit The pause after you ask for a new path, and why pressing again makes the sample worse.
- The account being made The one wait in this band with real work for you to do at the end of it.
- A first confirmation on a deposit You have broadcast a payment and the market cannot see anything yet.
- The balance catching up The network has finished its part. The market has not looked yet.
- The order going through The heaviest write you will ask a market to do, and the worst place to press twice.
- A page that half arrived Structure without contents, and a browser that will sit on it far longer than you will.
- A cooldown after failed tries A wait imposed on purpose, which restarts every time you touch it.
- A withdrawal being sent Two waits stacked: the market deciding to pay, then the network settling it.
An evening
You put the machine down and come back to it the same day.
- A deposit reaching enough confirmations Acknowledged early, credited late. The gap between those two events is the whole wait.
- A vendor reading your message A message is a queue entry, not a doorbell. Somebody has to sit down before it is answered.
- An address coming back One of the strings stops opening. From your side, every possible cause looks the same.
- An order being accepted You finished the checkout. Somebody still has to look at the order and agree to it.
- A captcha you keep failing The gate keeps refusing you. Trying harder is the one move that reliably fails.
- Maintenance finishing Planned work leaves notes. It is also the only wait here with a stated end you still should not trust.
- The pause you add yourself The one wait here that you choose. It costs nothing and it is worth more than the rest put together.
Days
Tomorrow is the right time to look, not tonight.
- A parcel moving Dispatch is one event. Movement is another. The wait tells you about neither.
- A dispute being looked at A person with a backlog reads two accounts. Most of the outcome was decided before they started.
- Escrow running down to auto release The one wait on the site where the clock is not background. It is the subject.
- A vendor gone quiet A slow reply and an absence are the same screen for longer than is comfortable.
- A refund being agreed An agreement in a message is not money moved. Somebody still has to type it.
- The published set changing The strings are not permanent. The risky part is the gap before you know.
- A support ticket One ticket on the first day is worth more than three across a week.
Open-ended
Nothing in the mechanism sets a ceiling, so no honest band exists.
- A market that has not come back Silence from every address, with no announcement coming.
- An order that never arrives The point where a delivery wait becomes a paperwork wait.
- Coins sent to the wrong place A payment that settled somewhere it should not have.
- An account locked without a reason The silence is the normal state of this one.
- A vendor who stops for good Quiet, then absence, with no line drawn between them.
- Certainty that is not coming The wait most people are actually in.
What the run shows that the cards do not
Three things come out of reading it in order.
The first is that the bands are not evenly spaced. There is a long step between an evening and days, and almost no step at all between the top of the seconds band and the bottom of minutes. That is because the bands are five kinds of mechanism rather than five slices of a ruler. Where the bands come from sets that out.
The second is how early the human beings appear. Everything from the evening band onwards has a person in it somewhere, and once a person is involved the wait stops being about the network at all. Most of the frustration people report about markets of this kind is really frustration about other people's schedules.
The third is that the waits stack. Very few of them happen alone. A deposit is a broadcast, then a settlement, then a poll on the market side, and each of those sits in a different band. Someone watching a balance is inside three waits at once and will usually blame whichever one they have heard of.
Where the risk sits along the run
| Along the run | What tends to go wrong there |
|---|---|
| Near the start | Reading a short silence as a failure and acting on it. The cost is usually a duplicate of something, and duplicates in the minutes band are expensive. |
| In the middle | Staying at the screen for something that will not resolve at the screen. The cost is attention rather than money, but it is also where people start hunting for replacement addresses. |
| Towards the end | Missing a deadline you did not know was running. Everything in the days band is at risk of this, and escrow running down is the specific case. |
| Past the end | Treating the absence of an end as a reason to keep waiting. The open-ended band exists to name that, and every card in it gives a condition instead of a duration. |
Reading it the other way
If you know how long you have been waiting, the run is the wrong shape. Use the register, which is the same set as a table you can scan by band, or go straight to the band hub that matches your situation and read the cards in it.
If you want the layout of a single card explained before you read any of them, how to read a card is short and covers the six headings.
What this card is not. This run is not a walkthrough and it is not the order things happen to you. It is the register sorted by length, which is a different thing entirely.