Orders / Pair 26 of 41
A word in a database, and an event in a record
Your order line changes state and the tension drops a little. That change was typed by somebody, and typing it is not the same as the thing having happened.
Both order lines read the same
The market shows you a state. It is one word, it sits in the same place for every order, and it looks exactly as official for a claim as it does for a fact. Nothing in the way it is drawn distinguishes the two.
This is not the market being deceptive. A market can only show what has been entered into it. The field exists so that sellers can say where an order has got to, and a field that a person fills in carries exactly as much weight as that person.
A claim entered by hand
Somebody has set a field in the market's database. The claim may be perfectly true. It may be true tomorrow rather than today. It may be a habit of marking early to keep a queue tidy. The market records the entry, not the event.
An event with a trace outside the market
Here the same statement is supported by a record the seller did not write and cannot edit. That record was made by a third party at a moment in time, and it exists whether the market's field says anything at all.
Who typed the word
Once you start asking who entered a piece of information, a lot of order screens look thinner than they did. Most of what you read on an order line was put there by one of the two people in the transaction, and most of it has never been checked by anybody.
The useful habit is to sort what you can see into two piles. Things the market observed on its own, such as a balance moving or a clock starting, and things a person asserted. The first pile is small. The second is where nearly every disagreement starts.
The same sorting exercise settles tracking that is not moving and it settles most of what people bring to a dispute.
| What you are looking at | Who put it there | What it establishes |
|---|---|---|
| The balance leaving your account | The market, on its own | That you paid, and when |
| A clock started or a state timestamped by the market | The market, on its own | That a rule is now running against a date |
| A status word on the order line | A person, by hand | That a person said so at some point |
| A message in the order thread | A person, by hand | What that person wanted you to think at the time |
| An entry in a record kept elsewhere | A third party with no interest in the outcome | That something was logged by somebody neither of you controls |
Only the first two rows and the last one are much use in an argument. The middle rows are the ones people quote at each other for a week without getting anywhere, since each side is quoting its own assertions back at the other.
Is there a second record
The test that separates them
Ask whether anything outside the market says the same thing. If the only source for the claim is the market's own order line, you have a claim and not an event.
- Name the source of the statement.
- Ask who is able to edit that source.
- If the answer is the seller, the statement and the seller are the same thing.
- If the answer is somebody with no interest in the outcome, you are looking at an event.
The wrong reading in each direction
- If you read a bare flag as an event
- You relax, you stop asking, and you assume the delay now belongs to somebody else. The finalise clock keeps running through all of that relaxation, and it does not slow down for optimism. This is the costly direction.
- If you read a real dispatch as a bare flag
- You press for detail on something that has actually happened and you look impatient doing it. You may spend a little standing with the other side. Nothing about your balance changes and every option stays open.
Once you know which it is
- If it is a flag and nothing else
- Treat the order as still open in every way that matters. Keep watching the market's clock rather than the status word, and ask for something outside the market that supports the claim.
- If there is an outside record
- You now have a date that neither of you controls. Use it as the anchor for any question about timing, and stop arguing about the flag, which has become the least interesting thing on the page.
A flag is not a lie. It is an unverified entry, which is a different and much more common thing. Most of them turn out to be accurate. The problem is that the ones that are not accurate look identical, and your clock runs at the same speed either way.
Questions readers send about this pair
Does a shipped status start the clock for a dispute?
That depends on the market's own rules rather than on the truth of the flag. Read what the market says the state triggers, since a clock that starts on an entry starts whether the entry is accurate or not.
Can a seller change a status back?
Fields that a person can set are usually fields a person can unset. That is precisely why the state on its own is weak evidence and why an outside record settles matters that the flag cannot.
Is marking an order early dishonest?
Often it is just housekeeping. Sellers work through queues and mark things in batches, and an entry made a day ahead of the event is common enough to be unremarkable. The point is not that the flag is false. The point is that it is unverified, so it cannot carry the weight of a decision on its own.