CCOA'S UMS SCRIPT HELP [XP]

I have a lot of instances in my game where the character walks around and I want him to kind of catch bits of other people's conversation, and I have an idea of how to trigger that with switches or a parallel processing event when he comes onto the map (that works, right?)... I'm using CCOA's UMS - universal message system.. and sometimes it happens that it works how I want where the dialogue will post on screen and you the player will be able to move around the screen while the dialogue displays and comes and goes (there is a message command which will automatically close the window after a certain number of frames). But this only works every once in a while, and I don't know why when it doesn't work why it doesn't work.

I am marking the events as parallel processing. Anyone have an idea?