2 February 2026
Silence before cancel is a texture, not a count
Days-since-last-visit is a popular column because it is cheap. It is also a blender. A night-shift nurse who comes twice a month and a Saturday climber who comes twice a week can share a “14” and mean opposite things. One is on schedule. The other is already gone.
In class we draw cadence portraits: eight accounts, by hand, with the person’s usual gaps marked in pencil and the unusual gap in ink. Students complain, then notice they have been alerting on pencil. The Interview Protocol for Silence clinic exists because a phone call that ignores texture sounds like a collections department.
What texture includes
Season, shift pattern, shared family logins, and the product’s own closed days. A climbing wall that shuts for a bank holiday should not manufacture silence. A meal kit that skips Christmas week should not either. If your warehouse does not know the wall was closed, your model will invent a personality crisis.
A mild disagreement we keep having
Some analysts want to encode texture as a dozen embeddings and skip the paper. We do not forbid that later. We forbid it in week two, because embeddings trained on a blender still taste like a blender. The portrait is a brake, not a religion.