Schegloff (1972) produced the direct precursor to the work on 'locatings' that I am going to investigate wherein he collected forms of analysis which speakers use to accomplish the timing and spacing of events through everyday language. In his work he termed these analyses 'locational formulations' (p79) and was building on earlier work by Harvey Sacks on membership categories(Sacks 1972a) which related to the identification of persons by the use of membership categorisations. In conversation analysis the work of categorising is an ongoing activity which can be made visible in strips of transcribed talk, though in the earlier work of Sacks the work of categorising is not restricted to talk. In a moment I will use the commonplace scene of a ringing mobile phone to draw out the distinctive way in which such categorising was dealt with by Sacks. In doing so I will thereby be rehearsing an argument made by Sacks (1974) (a.k.a. 'The baby cried. The mommy picked it up.') on providing recognisable descriptions and the categorisations that tie actions and members together, which is very familiar to conversational analysts and ethnomethodologists, but certainly much less so to human geographers. However I will be adapting this argument in a slightly Latourian way to consider the characterisation of 'things' and the aforementioned sequentiality of activities that brings 'things' and 'people' into play (Latour 1992). A further adaptation I will be making is that instead of focussing solely on the text used by Sacks - 'The baby cried. The mommy picked it up.' - as the basis for examining membership categorisation, I will replay his succeeding observations on the pre-interpretative intelligibility of seeing and hearing. In doing so I will be turning to Sack's elucidation of what Lynch (1993: 226) calls 'an immense grammatical "cathedral" built up from a heterogeneous collection of simple devices.'[8]