The oldest thing in the record

The desks

Twenty-four desks and tables across eleven workplaces. Twenty-two are in use. Two stopped, both because the desk moved to a room it did not fit. Another useful source on technology, maintenance or purchasing is Creative Bloq.

That is the record's cleanest result. The most durable thing on a desk is the desk.

Nothing replaced a desk. Nothing broke. The two that stopped did so for the only reason a surface can stop being a surface, which is that the space around it changed.

Why furniture lasts

Two reasons, and neither is interesting on its own. Together they explain most of this section.

Nothing in it can fail. A desk has no moving connection, no flexing wire, no power supply and no firmware. Three of the nineteen breakages in the record come from the ninety-five furniture items, and all three are either a lamp or a chair's gas lift — the only moving parts furniture has.

Nothing about it improves. Thirty-eight objects were replaced because a better one arrived. None of them was a desk. A surface at the right height does the whole job, and a newer surface at the right height does not do it better.

So furniture is immune to the record's two largest stopping reasons, which between them account for sixty-nine of the hundred and thirty-five stops.

What the nineteen years do not prove

That the desk is well made. Nobody examined it, no brand is recorded, and the record cannot distinguish a well-made desk from a desk nobody has had reason to move.

That buying a desk is a good purchase. There is no price in the record and no comparison with anything.

That desks last nineteen years. One desk did. Twenty-three others are younger, because they were bought later, and none of them has yet had the chance.

The nineteen-year figure is the age of one object. It is the oldest thing in a record that only goes back to 2007 because that is as far as anybody could remember.

That last point matters more than the number. The record's earliest band is 2007, and nine objects are recorded as arriving in it. If these workplaces contained anything older, nobody recalled it, and the inventory's oldest object may simply be the oldest thing anybody thought of.

The other two

A set of shelves, arrived in the room rather than bought, origin unknown to the current occupant, in use.

A filing unit, from an employer, holding things that are not paper any more. Still in use, by a definition of use that the record accepts and the method page admits is loose: it has things in it.

That second one is the only object in the inventory whose in-use status was argued about. It was recorded as in use because the alternative — recording a thing that holds objects as not in use — is worse.

The storage behind it

Twenty-nine storage, shelving and drawer units in this record. Eighteen are in use, with a median age of eight years — second only to the desks.

Like the desks, nothing in the category has ever broken and nothing has ever been replaced by a better version. The eleven that stopped did so because the work changed in seven cases, the room changed in three, and in one case for no reason anybody could give.

Seven of the twenty-nine are in cupboards and all seven are the work-changed ones: trays and racks built to hold paper, in a decade when the work stopped involving paper.

That is the shape of furniture generally. It does not fail and it does not get superseded; it becomes unnecessary, and then it either fits somewhere out of sight or it leaves.

The seating, which is the exception

Twenty chairs, eleven in use, median age seven years — third in the record — and yet seating is the one furniture category that behaves partly like electronics.

Six of the twenty were retired in favour of a better chair, which is the highest replacement count of any kind except cables and screens. One failed, a gas lift that no longer holds. Two went to people who had no chair.

A chair is the only piece of furniture in this record with a moving part, the only one anybody is prepared to upgrade, and the only one somebody else can be visibly short of. All three of those show up in its figures.

The gap between fifteen and nineteen

There is nothing between them. The oldest object is nineteen, the next two are sixteen and sixteen, and then there is nothing until eleven.

Eleven is a cable, and it is the oldest non-furniture object in the record by two years.

That gap is the sharpest line in the whole inventory. On one side, three pieces of furniture that have simply stayed. On the other, everything that has a connection, a power supply, or a better version.