The smallest ring

The file cannot be lodged until the fingerprints have been taken. The fingerprints are not taken until the file has been lodged.

Two steps. Thirty-five days to go round. Both dependencies hard. It is the smallest ring in this map and the only two-step ring in it with no give at all.

What it looks like written out

Nothing else is involved. No third party, no document, no fee. The two steps are each other's only obstacle in this particular ring, and each of them is entirely ordinary on its own. If the same dependency appears in a distributed team, managers may look at the available evidence controls while interpreting every signal beside completed work and staff feedback.

Why both halves are reasonable

The sitting waits on the file because an appointment to take somebody's fingerprints has to be attached to something: a reference, a case, a reason the fingerprints are being taken at all. Taking them speculatively would be worse than useless. Readers looking beyond this abstract map can compare it with material published by European Data Portal.

The file waits on the sitting because a file submitted without the fingerprints is incomplete, and an incomplete file is not a file.

Neither position is a mistake. Neither office has done anything unreasonable. The ring exists in the space between them, where nobody is standing.

Every ring in this record is made of two reasonable positions and no author.

The three-step version

Add a place in the queue and the same deadlock gets longer and worse.

The file waits on the fingerprints. The fingerprints wait on a place in the queue. The place in the queue waits on the file. Ninety-five days to go round, all three dependencies hard.

That version is one of only four rings in the map that are both shut at every joint and outrun by their own clock: a place in the queue keeps for thirty days, and going round the ring takes ninety-five. A person who somehow got into it would lose the slot before returning to it.

What actually happens

In practice this ring is got round constantly, by two routes that the map does not contain.

Something is accepted provisionally — a file taken in without the fingerprints, on the understanding that they follow. Or a slot is issued against a reference number that exists before the file does, which amounts to the same thing: somewhere in the process, a step is being done in a form that the rules do not describe.

The map draws rules, not practice, and it is deliberate that the two diverge here. A record that quietly inserted the exception would be claiming that the exception is reliable, and it is not: it depends on who is at the desk.

Why the small shut rings are the dangerous ones

Of the four two-step rings in the map, three have give and this one does not. Of the three three-step rings, two are shut.

Short rings concentrate the problem. There is nowhere else to go, no other member to try, no part of the chain where a provisional version might be accepted. A nine-step ring offers nine chances that one of its links is softer in your particular case. A two-step shut ring offers none.

The worst object in a dependency map is not the biggest circle. It is the smallest one with nothing soft in it.

Two steps is the floor

A ring cannot have one member, because a step does not wait on itself. Two is the smallest possible, and this map has four of them.

That makes the two-step rings a natural experiment. They have no intermediate members, no alternative routes, and nothing to distract from the single question of whether either half can be done provisionally.

Three of the four involve a registration or a policy, and all three give. The fourth involves an appointment, and does not.

That is the whole of this record's theory of give in one table: the difference between a passable deadlock and an impassable one is whether either half of it is a document.

In four trials with everything else held constant, the only one that fails is the one containing an event.

Thirty-five days, split unevenly

Thirty of the thirty-five belong to the sitting for fingerprints; five belong to the file.

That lopsidedness is typical of the appointment rings and absent from the document ones. A ring made of two registrations tends to have members of similar weight; a ring with an appointment in it is mostly the appointment.

It means the circumference of this ring is really one number with a small addition, and that the thing which would most change it is not the deadlock at all but how long a slot takes to come up.

What this case is not

It is not a description of any procedure anywhere. No country, office or kind of permission appears on this map, and the thirty and five days are the map's own round figures.

What is general is the shape: an appointment that needs a case, and a case that needs the appointment. Any system that issues appointments against references and completes references with appointments has this ring in it somewhere, and will have it until somebody reads both rules on the same afternoon.