Every stall, in clock order

How to use this page

Read down until something sounds like your evening, then follow the link. The stalls are in clock order rather than in order of severity, because knowing where you are is the thing that turns a vague problem into a small one.

Minute 0 to minute 15

• Preparation treated as preamble. The phase with no screen gets skipped, and the cost lands at minute 45 or 60. Minute 0.
• Setup as a project. Reading about ideal machines instead of starting. The machine page.
• The search loop. Looking for proof about an address that is not available anywhere. Collecting addresses.
• Filter fatigue. An ordinary English word produces pages of irrelevant results, and the tired reader believes the next tidy page. Why crown is hard to search.
• The refresh loop. Reloading a queue page and making the wait longer. The queue and the wall.
• Abandoning a good address. A strange first screen sends somebody back to a search box. When nothing loads.

Minute 25 to minute 45

• The name field. Ten minutes on a decision with no consequences, next to a confirm button that gets one second. Choosing a name.
• The memorable password. No reset link, so people pick something weak. The password page.
• The unrecorded second code. A small field that blocks the first attempt to use the balance. The second code.
• Storage decided in four seconds. A one time screen and a hurried choice of where to put it. The phrase page.
• Never testing recovery. Written down is not the same as recoverable. Testing recovery.
• The unbounded wait. Money sent, nothing showing, no way to tell whether that is normal. The wait.
• The double send. A second transfer at the twenty minute mark. A deposit that has not arrived.

Minute 60 to minute 90

• Open ended browsing. The phase with no natural end, absorbing half an hour. Minute 60.
• The sentence query. Search here matches text rather than interpreting it, and an empty result reads as an empty market. Search.
• Looking for a threshold. Trying to find the score that means safe, when there is no such number. Reading a seller page.
• The encryption step. The single largest stall on this site, arriving with an order half placed. Encrypting what you type.
• The unhesitated confirm. The only click with no undo is the one nobody pauses on. The order you cannot take back.
• The forgotten timer. Attention runs out around day four and the hold expires on day nine. Finalising.
• The postponed tidying. Small jobs with no deadline that only matter months later. The week after.

The pattern across all of them

Two things repeat often enough to be worth naming on their own.

The first is that attention is spent almost exactly backwards. The decisions with no consequences get the most deliberation and the irreversible ones get the least. A name field takes ten minutes and a confirm button takes a second.

The second is that most stalls are caused by an absence of feedback rather than by difficulty. A queue with no progress bar, a balance that does not change, an order that sits at the same status for a day. In each case there is nothing wrong and nothing to see, and the missing signal is what produces the wrong action.