Consider the fourteenth hour of a shop assistant's shift, and the difference between a customer who says thanks while already turning away and one who looks up first.
The second costs nothing and lands somewhere. You will never find out where — that is the nature of the thing — but the transmission is real, and it is one of the very few outcomes you can be reasonably certain of putting into a day. Almost everything else about today is negotiable with the world. That part is not.