Body and time: the family you cannot hurry

Six of the thirty-six steps cannot be done by sending a letter. Cover against illness, a check by a doctor, a sitting for fingerprints, an interview in person, a place in the queue, and the fee paid.

Five of the six require somebody else to be somewhere at a particular time, and that is what makes this family behave unlike any other in the map.

The family by what it costs

Three of the four longest waits in the whole map are here. The fourth is the decision, which waits on three of these six. To compare the map with real work patterns, reviewers can read the vendor's explanation and define the decision, access rules and review date in advance.

The queue that expires before you reach the front

A place in the queue takes sixty days to obtain and keeps for thirty.

That is the only step in the map whose life is shorter than its wait, and it is not a drafting error. A slot booked two months out is good for a month once you have it, and the two figures are measuring different things: how long until you are given a date, and how long the date remains usable. A wider policy and evidence perspective is available from National Bureau of Economic Research.

The consequence shows up in the rings. A place in the queue stands in four of them, and in all four the walk round is longer than thirty days — the shortest takes ninety-five. Going round costs the thing you went round for, every time, without exception.

A step that takes twice as long to get as it lasts cannot be stockpiled. It has to be obtained at exactly the right moment, which is the one thing a tangled map makes impossible to arrange.

The smallest shut ring in the map lives here

The file waits on the sitting for fingerprints. The sitting for fingerprints waits on the file.

Two steps, thirty-five days to go round, both dependencies hard. It is the shortest ring in the record and the most quoted kind of deadlock there is: the appointment cannot be made until the application exists, and the application cannot be completed until the appointment has happened.

A third step joins them in a longer version — the file, the queue, the fingerprints — which takes ninety-five days to walk and is also shut at every joint. That one is one of only four rings in the map that are both shut and outrun by their own clock.

Cover against illness, which is the family's joint

Cover against illness stands in eight rings, more than any other member of this family, and it does so by connecting outward rather than inward.

It waits on the tax number, the account, the card in hand and the registered address. It is waited on by the doctor's check, the card in hand, the file, and the next file.

The pair that closes is the obvious one: cover waits on the card, and the card waits on cover. Thirty-six days to go round, with give in it — the dependency running from cover to the card is soft, so cover can be arranged in a provisional form and replaced later.

That single soft edge is why this family is passable at all.

The fee, which is free

The fee paid takes one day, keeps for sixty, stands in no ring, and is waited on by five steps. It is the second most load-bearing cheap step in the map after the passport copy.

It is also the only step here that does not need anybody else to be anywhere, which is presumably why it is the only one in the family that nobody ever complains about.

Why events cannot be provisional

Every soft dependency in this map rests on the same thing: that some version of the step can be produced which is not quite right and will be replaced.

Documents allow that. A registration can be provisional, a policy can be basic, a showing of income can be assembled from the wrong evidence and redone.

Events cannot. Fingerprints have been taken or they have not. An interview happened or it did not. A doctor saw somebody or did not. There is no partial version to hand over and nothing to repair later.

One of the six carries all of this family's give. Cover against illness is the only member with a soft dependency attached to it, and it opens six rings; the fee is outside every ring and so has nothing to open.

Four of the six steps in this family are events, and the map has no technique for an event. That is why every ring confined to this family is shut.

What the family is not

No office, appointment system, medical procedure or amount of money appears on this map. "A check by a doctor" is a role in a dependency map, not a description of anything anybody has to undergo, and nothing here should be taken as an account of what any process involves.

What the family contributes to the record is a single structural point: the steps that need another person's time are the slowest in the map and the hardest to schedule, and three of the four rings that the clock actually beats pass through one of them.