Seventy-eight things kept and not used

The shape of the record

in use                      149    52%
kept, intact, unused         78    27%
broken and kept               8     3%
given away or sold           27    10%
thrown out                   22     8%

Eighty-six objects are being kept and not used — the seventy-eight intact and the eight broken. Forty-nine have left. A fair workplace review separates asset ownership from employee performance; reviewers can inspect the setup before a pilot while writing down which signals are relevant and which are not.

So for every object that left these eleven workplaces, nearly two are still there, doing nothing. A separate perspective on devices and their useful life is available from Hackaday.

What is in there

The grid above gives it by kind. Three figures carry the section.

Twenty-one cables and adapters, more than a quarter of the cupboard, and the single largest category by a wide margin.

Fourteen input devices — keyboards, pointing devices, and one graphics tablet. Mostly replaced rather than failed.

Eleven screens and stands. The most substantial objects in there by volume and the ones whose presence is least deniable.

Four chairs, which is the figure people find hardest to believe. Four working chairs, kept and not sat on, across eleven workplaces.

Where it all came from

Crossing the kept group with origin gives this:

Between twenty-five and thirty-four per cent, every row.

That flatness is the most striking single result in the record. Where an object came from predicts almost nothing about whether it ends up in a cupboard. A thing somebody chose and paid for and a thing that was simply standing in the room when they arrived have close to the same chance of ending up kept and unused.

Nobody is more careful with what they chose themselves. Twenty-eight per cent of bought-new objects are in cupboards, against thirty-one per cent of gifts.

Why it accumulates

Three mechanisms, and the first is much the largest.

Replacement without disposal: 27 objects. Something better arrived, the old thing worked, and nobody found a reason to act. A third of the whole cupboard traces to this one pattern.

The work changed: 21 objects. The job that needed the thing stopped happening. Paper equipment, telephones, trays.

It stopped being reached for: 19 objects. No cause, no moment, and therefore no decision.

Those three account for sixty-seven of the seventy-eight intact items. All three share a structure: the object does not present itself for a decision, so no decision gets made.

The two reasons that do present a decision — it broke, somebody needed it — contribute twelve objects between them.

Almost nothing comes back

Six objects in the entire record went from a cupboard back into use, and all six left for somebody else's desk rather than returning to the one they came from.

Four cables came out of storage when a cable failed, which is the one case of a cupboard doing the job people say cupboards do.

Six out of eighty-six. Seven per cent. The page on this puts it at length, because it is the hinge of the whole section: if things came back, a cupboard would be a store. They do not, so it is something else.

Two readings of seventy-eight

Waste. Twenty-seven per cent of everything ever bought for these desks is sitting unused, most of it because somebody bought a replacement and did not deal with the original. Space, money, and materials, idle.

Prudence. Twenty-one spare cables meant four failures cost nothing. Four chairs meant somebody who needed a chair got one. Things kept are things available, and the alternative to a full cupboard is buying again.

The record supports both and settles neither, and the closing page of this section lays out what each reading requires you to assume.

The two kinds with nothing in there

Twenty-four desks and eight printing items, and not one of either is kept and unused anywhere in eleven workplaces.

Both are empty rows for the same reason. A desk is in use or it has left the building; a printer the same. Neither can be kept without somebody noticing that it is being kept, and noticing is what forces a decision.

That is the clearest evidence in the record for what the cupboard actually is. It is not a store of things people value and it is not a record of what people are reluctant to lose. It is a function of what fits out of sight.

nothing kept at all        desks (24), printing (8)
more kept than in use      input devices (38): 16 against 15

Input devices at the other extreme: thirty-eight objects, more of them in drawers than on desks. Small, cheap, easily superseded, never worth the trip to dispose of.

What the figure looks like without the small things

Take out cables, adapters and input devices — the two kinds that accumulate fastest and cost least to keep — and the kept group falls from eighty-six to forty-six, out of a hundred and eighty-six objects remaining.

Thirty per cent becomes twenty-five. The shape of the finding survives, which is worth knowing: the cupboard is not simply a cable drawer with a reputation. Forty-six substantial objects are kept and unused across eleven workplaces, which is four each.

What the figure excludes

Consumables, paper, and anything personal — none of the eleven inventories counted those.

Objects forgotten entirely. A cupboard is where forgetting happens, and the one place in this record where an undercount is most likely is exactly here.

The eight broken items, which are counted separately and have their own page, because keeping a thing that does not work is a different act from keeping a thing that does.