This short study asks how a scene written for comparison hears talk addressed to a decision, a "not yet", a "wait", an "I will review it", and where it places the time that someone spends waiting for the answer. It reads the eleven synthetic scenes that GAEKJU files under the two kinds of talk it calls "Looking up" and "Holding out" and whose evidence holds no digit. Every scene is synthetic, written for comparison and not as testimony from its trade, so the study reads only how the scenes are built.
The study finds three things. First, every scene sets beside the speaker a reading that sides with the schedule, the form or the one above, and no scene leans to it; only one leans to the reading that sides with the speaker, and ten of the eleven lean to a third reading that asks for a check, a time or an authority before either side is believed. Second, the scenes hear the words as a question about a time some record did not hold: the inspection time missing from a plan, the recheck missing from a booking sheet, the recovery of trees missing from an event date. Five of the eleven name a deadline, a time for the answer or the length of the wait. Third, eight of the eleven proposals divide or allot time, and five refuse to leave the wait, or the work of explaining it, with one person, one side or one group. Read beside the research on voice and silence and on time at work, the contribution is a figure those debates leave in the background: the third party who waits while a decision is held open.