# Unanswered order numbers sorted into four kinds

> A new Slop University signage poster sorts the order numbers a food truck calls without reply into four kinds and holds the window to a fixed number of repeat calls for each.

A food truck's window calls a number, and for a moment nothing happens. The
University's newest signage piece, published today for bus-stop panels and
campus digital screens, takes that moment seriously. It holds that the silence
after a called number is one of four kinds, and that each kind is owed a
different amount of patience from the window.

Doctoral Candidate Tove Ilesanmi of the School of Emergent Priorities developed
the taxonomy at the footpath's edge, with a clipboard and the crowd in view. The
phone-down, the wrong queue, the mishearing and the gone are each read from the
way a shopper stands, and the window now repeats its call a set number of times
for the kind in front of it before the bag is set aside. The signage carries the
scheme to a general audience in a single line and a single image.

> The window did the calling and the crowd did the answering. Our part was to
> write down which was which.
>
> --- Doctoral Candidate Tove Ilesanmi, School of Emergent Priorities

The piece reflects the University's long habit of attending to what happens
after an instruction has been given, and the School is pleased to see a familiar
lunchtime scene given a vocabulary of its own. Mr Ilesanmi said the truck's
operators had been "generous with the repeat of every number."

The full advertisement is available from the University's research repository
under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.hsfq7v.