At 06:28 Eastern on Monday 14 September, the job that writes the multisport answer articles for thearchv.ca started and stopped five seconds later. The only thing it produced was one line: "You've hit your weekly limit · resets Sep 15 at 5pm (America/Toronto)".

That job files an article a day each for the NFL, Formula 1, tennis and golf, and a basketball article on Mondays only, with the WNBA and the NBA taking turns week to week. 14 September was to be the first WNBA Monday. There is no basketball article for it.

What the limit stopped

The weekly usage limit on the account my scheduled jobs run under was already spent by early Sunday. Between 00:47 and 06:04 on 13 September, six scheduled runs stopped on that message.

The Mac powered up at 06:15 on Monday, and the scheduler fired the runs it had missed. Seven of them stopped between 06:26 and 06:28. Two, the AI news desk and the football desk, had "Try again" sent into their sessions within four minutes, and both finished that morning. Nothing was sent to the other five on Monday.

The message gives a reset time, so it reads like a pause. The run does not wait for the reset. It is recorded as failed, and nothing more happens in that session until a message goes into it.

What the retry did

At 17:04 on Tuesday 15 September, "Try again" went into three of the stopped Monday sessions within 11 seconds of each other: the multisport desk, the daily AI company feature and a film carousel job. The limit had reset at 17:00.

The multisport run carried on in the session it had opened on Monday. The first date note in that session told the agent it was 14 September. The note on resume said the date had changed to 15 September. The job's spec says to read the clock first and date every entry from it, and to treat basketball as due only when the weekday number is 1. The clock said 2.

So the run did Tuesday properly. It filed four articles, for the NFL, Formula 1, tennis and golf, and logged basketball as not due. Its log row notes the 05:00 slot was missed and that no run had happened on 13 or 14 September, written from a session that opened on the 14th.

At 18:04 the scheduler fired Tuesday's own run, which found the day's four articles already live and shipped nothing, the second run of the desk that Tuesday.

The explanation written that night

My nightly review of the desks recorded that the Mac went into clamshell sleep on battery at 21:46 on Monday, that every desk ran about 11 hours late, and that the basketball Monday was missed. The next day's decision moved the first WNBA Monday to 21 September and named the sleep as the reason the desk never ran.

The power log does show that sleep. The session record puts the multisport stop at 06:28, more than 15 hours before the lid closed. The Mac fully woke at 17:00:43 on Tuesday and the limit reset at 17:00, so a late afternoon run fits either account until you read the run's first timestamp.

What a date-dependent job needs

A job whose work depends on the weekday needs two dates, the one it was fired for and the one it is running on. When they differ, the run should say which it is doing, either the missed day's work under the missed day's date, or today's work with the missed day written down as missed. My multisport spec reads only the clock, so a retry takes the second route without saying so.

The fired-for date is already in the session. The first date note is written when the run opens, and a resumed run can compare it with the clock before its first step.

A limit stop needs a log row of its own, naming the task and the time. The multisport stop on Monday left nothing in my agent logs, so the scoring desk could report the answer desk as dark for 14 September but had no line saying why.

A run retried after its day has passed is a catch-up, and its report should open with both dates.

The Monday session is still dated 14 September. It holds five seconds of Monday and four articles from Tuesday.