Sampling without chasing every strange visit

Every sample grows a celebrity clip. Someone pays in a café with the phone upside down. Someone pastes an identity number into the promo field. The room laughs, and then someone says we should “really focus on that.”

We do not. We park it.

The parking lot is a page at the back of the appendix: identifier, timestamp, one sentence, and a label — tester, extraordinary, or incomplete. Incomplete means the recording died. Extraordinary means we have not seen it twice. Tester means Jia Wen recognised a staff email.

The memo’s body is reserved for patterns that appear more than once in the locked list, or for a single clip that answers a question you posed at intake (“does anyone ever reach the receipt?”). A celebrity clip can answer that kind of question. It cannot found a new question in week three.

If you want a study of only strange visits, say so at intake. That is a different sample plan, usually smaller, and the memo will be a catalogue, not an account of ordinary weekday use. Mixing the two is how a grocery app ends up redesigning checkout around a person who was filming a tutorial.