Why almost nothing comes back

The six

Four of the six are cables and adapters, which is the cheapest and most numerous category in the cupboard.

The screen and the chair are the only substantial objects in the record that storage ever supplied to anybody.

The only mechanism that works

Four of the six came out because something in use broke and a spare was there.

That is the thing cupboards are supposed to do, happening four times in a record of two hundred and eighty-four objects.

It is worth being precise about the scale. Twenty-one cables and adapters are in storage. Four failures were covered by them. So the spare-cable system has a hit rate somewhere around one in five, and the other seventeen cables have so far done nothing.

That is still the clearest justification for keeping anything that this record contains, and it is made entirely out of objects nobody thinks about.

Why the other eighty do not return

Because the reason they stopped does not reverse.

Replaced: 27. The replacement is still there and still better. There is no circumstance short of the new object failing in which the old one would be wanted, and if the new one fails it will probably be replaced rather than fall back.

The work changed: 21. The work has not changed back. In nine workplaces the move away from paper is permanent as far as anybody can tell.

Stopped being reached for: 19. The habit that stopped did not restart. These are also the objects whose owners cannot say why they stopped, which makes a deliberate return unlikely.

The room changed: 7. The room is the room.

So the cupboard holds objects whose conditions for use have ended, not objects waiting for a turn. The distinction is the whole point: a store holds things that will be needed, and this holds things that were.

Eighty of the eighty-six are not in reserve. They are in residence.

What would have to be true for a return

Three things, and the record shows all three failing.

Somebody would have to know it is there. Four adapters in the cupboard could not be identified by their owners. An object whose purpose is unknown cannot be retrieved for a purpose.

The need would have to arrive while the object is still relevant. The screens and input devices in storage are from the years 2011 to 2021. The ones at the older end are no longer things anybody would reach for.

Somebody would have to go and look. In the two substantial cases — the screen and the chair — somebody did, and in both cases it was because a person asked for something out loud, not because anybody audited what was available.

The handover as the real exit

Two of the six returns are also departures: the screen and the chair left the cupboard and left the inventory, counted as given away.

That matches the other side of the record. Of the ten objects that stopped because somebody else needed them, six came out of storage rather than off a desk.

So the cupboard's main function in this record is not as a reserve for its owner. It is a supply for other people, operating about once a year across eleven workplaces, triggered by somebody saying they are short of something.

Six objects, six requests. Nobody ever went looking.

What the six were, by kind

Four cables and adapters, one screen, one chair.

Set that against what is in storage: twenty-one intact cables, fourteen input devices, eleven screens, nine lamps, eight audio items, seven storage items, four chairs.

Fourteen input devices and not one has ever come back. Nine lamps, none. Eight audio items, none. Seven storage items, none.

The returns are concentrated entirely in the one category where a failure in service creates an immediate, obvious need for an identical object — and in the two categories where somebody else can be visibly short of something.

returned from storage       cables 4, screens 1, seating 1
never returned              input 14, lamps 9, audio 8,
                            storage 7, and the rest

Why a keyboard never comes back

Because a keyboard that stops working is replaced rather than substituted.

Of the five input devices that broke in this record, three were thrown out and two are broken and kept. In none of the five cases did anybody go to the drawer that holds fourteen spare input devices and take one out.

That is the clearest single demonstration of what the cupboard is not. Fourteen working substitutes, five opportunities to use one, and zero uses. The spares existed, the need arose, and the two never met — because nobody knew the drawer's contents well enough to think of it, and buying is easier than searching.

Four cables are the exception, and cables are the exception precisely because a cable failure is diagnosed and fixed in the same minute by reaching for another one.

What this does to the prudence argument

The case for keeping things is that kept things are available.

The record supports a weak version of this and not a strong one. Available, yes — six times, and four of those saved a cable purchase. But availability at a rate of seven per cent, concentrated in objects worth very little, against eighty objects that are not available for anything because nobody knows what they are or where they would go.

The closing page of this section sets the two readings side by side and states what each one has to assume. This page only establishes the number: six.