The waiting, laid out

They feel identical from the inside. All of them are periods where nothing is happening on your screen and you do not know when that will change.

They are not identical in what a response would achieve. Waiting is right for some and useless for others, checking is informative for some and pointless for others, and asking makes sense for exactly one of them. Knowing which wait you are in tells you which of those applies, without needing any number.

Only the wait for another person responds to anything you do, and only slightly. A message may prompt a reply. A second message will not prompt a faster one and reliably makes things worse.

Every other wait on the list is a process you are outside of. Acting during one of those creates a second thing to track rather than resolving the first, which is the failure this section returns to on nearly every panel.

This board publishes no timings for anything, in this section or anywhere else. Not for page loads, not for transfers, not for dispatch, not for sessions.

The reason is consistent across all of them: it holds three onion strings and its own files, and neither of those knows how long anything takes. A duration here would be a guess, and readers use durations as thresholds for deciding something has gone wrong, so a guessed one causes action at the wrong moment.

The tiles, accordingly, count panels and words. That is the board being consistent rather than the board dodging the question.

• What you did, in enough detail to recognise it later.
• Roughly when, in relative terms that will still make sense to you.
• Which address you were on, since the set has several and they are genuinely different.
• What you saw, particularly anything unusual, because it will be unreproducible later.

A wait you understand is tolerable and a wait you do not understand is not, and the difference has nothing to do with length. Most of the distress in this process comes from not knowing which kind of wait you are in rather than from the waiting itself.

That is why this panel is a taxonomy with no numbers in it. The taxonomy is the useful part, and it happens to be the part this board can produce honestly.

Ordinary waiting comes with feedback. A progress bar moves, a delivery estimate updates, a page tells you where in a queue you are. None of that is a promise, and all of it does the same useful job: it distinguishes a slow process from a stopped one.

Almost none of the waits in this section come with any of that. The screen is the same whether something is progressing normally or has stopped entirely, which means every wait carries a live question that ordinary waits do not.

That is why the distress is out of proportion to the durations involved. It is not the length, it is the ambiguity, and the ambiguity is structural rather than a design failure anybody could fix from where they are. Naming it helps slightly, which is most of what this panel is for.