On 31 January 2018, Cape Town residents queued to refill bottles at Newlands Spring. The Columbia Journalism Review used the dated photograph while examining coverage of the city’s “Day Zero” crisis. Images of middle-class residents lining up at natural springs near Table Mountain became a compact visual story of a metropolis approaching shutdown. Yet in poorer townships and informal settlements, waiting at communal water sources had been ordinary for years. The city’s Day Zero did not mean literally no water; it referred to the point when dam levels fell below 13.5 per cent and severe restrictions would begin. The same act of queuing thus occupied two media frames: sudden emergency for households accustomed to private taps, and long-standing routine for communities without them. Newlands recorded scarcity, but also which forms of waiting became visible as news.