The shortest life

Why it is the only one of its kind

Every other stop in the record is about circumstances. Where home-office equipment is shared or supplied by an employer, teams can check the available controls directly to understand the available records before choosing the smallest workable setup.

Something better arrived. The work changed. The room changed. It broke. Somebody else needed it. It stopped being picked up and nobody knows why. For wider guidance on equipment, repair or workplace technology, consult Macworld.

None of those is a judgement on the object. This one is. The keyboard worked exactly as it was supposed to and the person did not like it.

The field has no value for that, and the entry is coded as replaced by something better, which is accurate in form and loses the only interesting thing about it.

The shortest lives, in order

Five objects in the record lasted under a year, out of a hundred and thirty-five that stopped.

Two keyboards, two cables, one headset. All small, all cheap by the accounts given, and all easy to replace — which is probably why they were, because a disappointing desk is lived with and a disappointing keyboard is not.

What a two-month life says about the record

It says the record's four-year median is a median and not a floor.

Five objects under a year, three objects over fifteen years, and most of the mass between two and six. That spread is wide enough that the median carries less information than the word median suggests, and anybody wanting a single number for how long desk equipment lasts will not find a defensible one here.

Two months to nineteen years, in the same inventory, among objects that sit on the same surface.

The thing the field could not ask

There is no value for I did not like it.

Adding one would have meant asking people to evaluate their equipment, and an evaluation field is how a record like this becomes a record of opinions about objects — which is one step from a recommendation, and recommendations are what this inventory is built not to make.

So the keyboard is coded as replaced, and this page exists to say what the coding dropped. Four other objects in the record had something similar volunteered about them, in passing, by people describing something else. None was asked for consistently, so none is counted, and the figure for objects abandoned because somebody disliked them is therefore unknown and greater than one.

That is the honest state of it.

What this does not support

A view about keyboards. One keyboard, one person, no brand recorded.

A view about buying carefully. Two months is a short life and the object was bought new by the person who chose it, which is the opposite of carelessness producing a short life.

If anything, the record's one observation on this points the other way: the thing bought deliberately by the person who would use it had the shortest life in the inventory, and the nineteen-year desk was also bought new. Two objects, bought the same way, nineteen years apart in outcome.

Nothing follows from two objects.

The kinds at the short end

Two of the five objects under a year are input devices and two are cables, and that matches where the record's short lives sit generally.

median recalled life, by kind
  cables and adapters       2 years
  audio                     3 years
  input devices             4 years
  screens and stands        4 years
  other                     4 years
  lamps and lighting        5 years
  seating                   5 years
  storage and organisers    6 years
  printing and scanning     6 years

Cables at two years is the lowest figure in the record by a clear margin, and the two cables among the five shortest lives both broke, at six and eight months.

The two input devices did not break. One was replaced after two months because the person did not get on with it and one after five for reasons the record does not hold. Both worked when they stopped.

So the short end of this inventory has two separate populations in it: cables that fail early, and small things somebody got rid of quickly because getting rid of a small thing is easy.

What a short life does not indicate

Nothing about the object, in four of the five cases.

A cable that fails at six months may have been faulty, badly routed, or simply unlucky, and the record does not know which. A keyboard abandoned at two months was working perfectly.

The record has no field for I did not like it and no field for condition on arrival, so none of the five can be attributed to the thing itself. They are five short entries in a column of a hundred and thirty-five, printed because the long end is printed.

Why the shortest life gets a page

Because the oldest object gets one, and publishing only the long end of a distribution is how a record flatters itself.

A page about a nineteen-year-old desk reads as a record of things lasting. A page about a keyboard nobody liked reads as a record of things not lasting. Both are one object out of two hundred and eighty-four, and the section needs both or neither.