How the inventory was made

The four fields

Origin. One of seven: bought new, from an employer, already in the room, bought second-hand, handed down, a gift, unknown.

Arrival. The two-year band the object reached this desk in. Two years rather than one because several people could place an object in a period and not in a year, and a wider band absorbs that without pretending to precision the accounts cannot support. The record here describes objects rather than output, so a distributed team may read the implementation details here and interpret operational data beside completed work and employee feedback.

Present state. In use, kept and intact, broken and kept, given away or sold, thrown out. A separate perspective on devices and their useful life is available from ASUS.

What preceded the stop, for the hundred and thirty-five objects no longer in use. One of six: replaced by something better, the work changed, stopped being reached for, it broke, the room changed, somebody else needed it.

A fifth field, kind, is in the record but was not asked of anybody. Whoever took the inventory assigned it, from ten categories settled at a pilot: cables and adapters, screens and stands, input devices, storage and organisers, desks and tables, audio, lamps and lighting, seating, printing and scanning, and other. Nineteen objects ended in the last of those.

The rule fixed before any counting

No brand, no model, no price, and no evaluation of any object.

The reasoning is set out in full in the last section of the record, and the short version is that an inventory with brands in it becomes a league table almost automatically — somebody counts how many of each are still in use and publishes the result as a durability table — and such a table built on eleven workplaces would be read as advice.

A second rule, circulated to all eleven workplaces in the same words: an item is in use if it was used in the ordinary course of the last month; everything else is kept if it is still in the workplace and gone if it is not.

The threshold held in the two cases where it gave an awkward answer. A lamp that is reached for only in the darker months was inventoried in summer and stands as kept; so does a screen that was set up twice in a year for a visitor. A six-month threshold would have moved up to eleven objects and raised the in-use figure from fifty-two to as much as fifty-six per cent.

What was deliberately left out

Price. The cost is real and visible: the record cannot say what eighty-six unused objects represent, or whether four avoided cable purchases justify holding twenty-one cables.

Manufacture year. Unknown for almost everything and reconstructible for almost nothing. The cost falls on the thirty-one second-hand objects, whose age the record systematically understates by an unknown amount.

Ownership. The one omission that plainly costs something. Sixty-one objects came from an employer and the record cannot say how many are legally the employer's. It was left out because the workplaces themselves were often unsure, and an unanswerable question yields a column of approximations.

Why this one. The reason behind a choice: interesting, unrecoverable years afterwards, and certain to be reconstructed rather than remembered.

What the vocabularies cost

Origin was closed at seven values and never changed. The stopping field began with five and a sixth was added when twenty-four objects in ten workplaces fitted none of them — which is why stopped being reached for is reported throughout as a residual category and not as a peer of the other five.

Where a vocabulary has to grow, the published figures say so. A residual category presented as an ordinary one is the easiest way to make a record look tidier than it is.

The three things this method would do differently

A date band for every stop. The largest gap. Without it there are no durations, no survival curves, and a four-year median built from recollection for a hundred and nine of the hundred and thirty-five stopped objects, with twenty-six having no estimate at all.

A field linking a replacement to what it replaced. Thirty-eight objects were replaced and none points to its successor. In at least four cases two generations of the same kind of object sit in the same cupboard and the record holds both without connecting them.

A size field, even a three-way tick: fits in a drawer, fits on a shelf, needs floor space. Almost every structural result here turns out to be about size, and all of it had to be inferred from the kind field, which was never meant to carry it.

What is published alongside the counts

Three things, all of them obligatory under this method.

The residual categories at full size: twenty-four unexplained stops and eight unknown origins, not folded into neighbours.

The figure that undermines the premise: a hundred and forty-nine objects still in use with a median age of six years, on the front page rather than in a footnote.

And what the instrument could not see. Every section of the record ends with its own list, and the final section collects nine of them in order of what each one costs.