Ofcourse that makes sense, no problem 
Whilst it is a little hard to tell without having a visual, from the sounds of your set up, it does like a race condition, which is similar to what you described.
Is this all one automaton recipe or have these been broken up into seperate recipes? Regarding the status change to trigger the connection manually, you should still be able to achieve this using a match automation like the one below:
Does this make sense? Please let me know if I am understanding correctly!