How things get into the cupboard

The routes, in order

Sixty-seven of the eighty-six — seventy-eight per cent — come from the top three rows. For wider guidance on equipment, repair or workplace technology, consult Instructables.

What the top three have in common

None of them produces a moment.

Replaced. The new object arrives. The old one is removed from the desk to make room, and that removal is a tidying action, not a decision. Nobody at any point asks what should happen to it.

The work changed. The task stopped happening gradually. There is no day on which the printer became unnecessary. The equipment goes quiet, then gets moved aside, then gets moved further aside.

Stopped being reached for. By definition no moment, since the owners cannot identify one.

In all three, the object leaves the desk without anybody ever considering the question of whether to keep it. The cupboard is not where things are put. It is where things end up when nothing is decided.

A cupboard is not a decision. It is the absence of one, given a location.

What the bottom three have in common

They produce a moment, and the moment produces a departure.

It broke. Forty-two per cent kept, the lowest of any reason except handovers. A broken thing is a thing somebody has to pick up and think about, and more often than not they throw it away.

Somebody needed it. Forty per cent. The handover is itself the decision.

The room changed. Fifty-four per cent, and the departures are concentrated in the six desk moves. Packing a desk forces a decision about every object at once.

Twenty-nine objects stopped through one of these three, and seventeen of them left. The other hundred and six stopped through the top three, and seventy-four of those stayed.

event-type reasons      12 kept, 17 gone     41% kept
drift-type reasons      74 kept, 32 gone     70% kept

That is the structural finding of this section and probably of the record: whether an object leaves the building is decided almost entirely by whether anybody was ever obliged to look at it.

The replacement route in detail

Twenty-seven objects, a third of the cupboard, from one pattern.

The sequence in every account is the same. A better object arrives. Both objects are briefly on the desk. The old one is moved to make space. It is now somewhere that is not the desk, and it is working, and there is nothing to do about it.

The only thing preventing disposal at this stage is that disposal requires a reason, and I am not using it is not experienced as a reason when the object is intact.

Eight of these twenty-seven are cables and adapters, six are screens and stands, five are input devices, three are lamps, three are chairs, and the remaining two are a headset and one other item.

Why size matters more than value

Of the twenty-seven replaced-and-kept objects, the four largest — the chairs — are the only ones anybody described as a problem.

Nobody in eleven workplaces described twenty-one cables as a problem, although twenty-one cables is the largest count in the cupboard.

The record contains no prices, so it cannot say whether the kept objects are valuable. What it can say is that the objects people notice are the ones that occupy floor space, and the objects that accumulate fastest are the ones that do not.

The eight broken ones

They arrive by the same non-decision.

A thing fails and is set aside, usually with a vague intention to see whether it can be fixed. The intention is never acted on, and the object has now been in the cupboard long enough that it is part of the furniture rather than a pending task.

Eight objects, their own page, because the mechanism is the same but the thing it preserves is worth nothing to anybody.

The same thing seen by kind

The six routes above are about what happened. Crossing the kept group with kind instead says where the objects came to rest, and it tells the same story from another angle.

kept, as a share of that kind
  input devices            42%
  lamps and lighting       41%
  cables and adapters      40%
  audio                    39%
  screens and stands       29%
  seating                  25%
  storage and organisers   24%
  other                    21%
  desks and tables          0%
  printing and scanning     0%

The four kinds at the top are the four smallest things on a desk. The two at the bottom are the two largest.

So the non-decision described above is not quite universal: it operates reliably on anything that fits out of sight, and not at all on anything that does not. Thirty-two objects in this record are desks or printing equipment, and every one of them is either in use or gone.

What that implies about the mechanism

That the absence of a decision is itself produced by circumstances rather than by character.

Nobody decided to keep sixteen input devices and nobody decided to get rid of six printers. In both cases the object's size decided whether a decision would be required, and the people involved supplied whatever followed.

If that is right, the eighty-six is not a measure of how people behave. It is a measure of how much of a desk's equipment happens to be small, and in this record the answer is most of it: a hundred and forty-three of the two hundred and eighty-four objects are cables, adapters, input devices, lamps or audio.

What the record cannot see

When each object entered the cupboard. No dates, so the cupboard cannot be shown growing.

Whether anybody intends to deal with any of it. Four accounts volunteered an intention. None was asked for consistently, so none is counted.

How much was forgotten. An object nobody remembers is an object that was not inventoried, and the cupboard is where that happens. This figure of seventy-eight is a floor, not a count.