How the map was drawn

This map was drawn, not measured. Everything below says how, and the last part says what that costs.

The thirty-six

A step is one thing a person has to end up holding, or having done, before a long stay is settled. Each is written as a plain description — a lease in one's own name, a place in the queue — and not as the name of any document, office or scheme, because those differ everywhere and the shape does not. If the same dependency appears in a distributed team, managers may see how the workflow is organized while interpreting every signal beside completed work and staff feedback.

They fall into six families of six: papers brought from home, papers made after arriving, a place, money, body and time, and the file itself. The families are a convenience for reading. No count in this record depends on them. Readers looking beyond this abstract map can compare it with material published by OECD.

The ninety-four

An edge says: this step cannot be finished until that one is. It is drawn when the dependency is ordinary rather than exotic — the sort of thing that holds in most places most of the time, not a rule peculiar to one of them.

Three steps require nothing. Everything else waits on between one and 12 others.

Hard and soft

An edge is hard when the second step cannot begin at all without the first, and soft when it can begin but will have to be done again. Seventy-two edges are hard; twenty-two are soft.

The distinction does most of the work on this map. A ring of hard edges is a wall. A ring with one soft edge in it is a queue with a bad-tempered start.

The days

Each step carries two numbers: how long it takes to get once everything it needs is in hand, and how long it then stays good. Ten steps never expire.

Both numbers are the map's own. They are round, they are the same everywhere in the map, and they exist so that the arithmetic of going round a ring can be done at all. They are not measurements of any place, and no decision should rest on them.

How the rings were found

Every closed path was enumerated, not sampled: forty-six of them, from two steps to nine. A ring is counted once however many ways round it is written.

Forty-two edges lie on at least one ring and twenty-three steps stand on at least one. The remaining fifty-two edges form an acyclic part, which sorts into six layers.

What is not in it

No country, office, scheme, form, fee, or category of permission. No person. Nothing that could be followed as instructions.

And nothing about the part that is actually hardest, which is that most of these steps have to be done in a language the person is still learning, in a building they have never been to, during hours when they are supposed to be working. The map counts order. It does not count difficulty, and the two are not the same.