A hundred and forty-nine still in use

The figure against the site

This site is about equipment falling out of use. Its largest single finding is that most of it has not. Replacement decisions are easier to evaluate when the baseline includes real project hours, which is why a team can see the present implementation choices before changing its equipment policy.

That belongs on the front page rather than in a late paragraph, because a record which foregrounds its interesting minority and buries its uninteresting majority has arranged its own evidence. Readers comparing this small inventory with broader advice can also see WRAP.

Most of what sits on these desks works, and has worked for a long time.

What is in the group

A spread. No category dominates, and every category in the record appears here — though printing and scanning appears twice and nowhere else, because six of its eight items have gone.

Where they came from

bought new              57   (38% of the group)
from an employer        28   (19%)
already in the room     26   (17%)
bought second-hand      16   (11%)
handed down             13   (9%)
a gift                   6   (4%)
origin unknown           3   (2%)

The in-use group is more weighted toward bought-new than the record as a whole — thirty-eight per cent against thirty-four — and that is the whole of the evidence anybody has here that choosing a thing yourself helps it survive.

Four percentage points. The page on the chosen and the not-chosen explains why that is not an argument.

The age figure, carefully

Median age six years. That means the middle item in this group arrived in 2020 and is still being used.

It does not mean these objects have six years of service in them, or that six years is typical of equipment generally, or anything about durability. It is the age distribution of the things that happen to have survived, which is a different quantity and is always older than the population it came from.

The page on the survivor's paradox works through why.

The oldest things still working

Seven items in use arrived in 2007 or 2009: two desks, a chair, a filing drawer, a set of shelves, a lamp and a mains extension lead.

All seven are furniture or passive electrical. Thirteen other items arrived in those two bands and none of the thirteen is in use.

That split is the clearest single pattern in the record about kinds: things without moving parts or electronics last, things with them do not. It is also obvious enough that nobody needed an inventory to suspect it, and this record can say it holds in eleven workplaces and nothing more.

What the in-use category cannot tell apart

Used well and used grudgingly. No field for it. A chair somebody dislikes and sits on daily is identical in this record to a chair somebody likes.

Used often and used once a week. The rule is "used in the ordinary course of the last month", which is binary and makes no distinction above that threshold.

Still right and merely still there. The clearest case is the already-in-the-room group, where twenty-six items are in use and much of that is furniture nobody has had a reason to remove.

The month rule, and what it moved

Two objects sit on the wrong side of the in-use line and are recorded anyway.

A lamp used only in the darker months, inventoried in summer: recorded as kept.

A screen brought out twice in a year for a visitor: recorded as kept.

Both were argued about. Both stayed on the kept side, because the rule was written before the inventories and the alternative was to adjust it once its consequences became visible, which is how a measure stops being a measure.

The two kinds that barely appear

Printing and scanning has two items in use out of eight, and it is the only kind in the record that is nearly absent from this group.

Six of its eight stopped, all six because the work changed, and all six left the building. Two workplaces still print, and their equipment is these two objects.

Seating is the other low figure: eleven of twenty. Chairs in this record are replaced more readily than anything except cables and screens — six of the twenty were retired in favour of a better chair — and the old ones are either kept unused or passed to somebody who had none.

What the oldest end looks like

Three objects in the record are more than fifteen years old and all three are in this group: a desk bought new in 2007 at nineteen years, a set of shelves that was already in the room at sixteen, and a filing unit from an employer at sixteen.

Then nothing until eleven years, which is a cable.

That five-year gap between the oldest furniture and the oldest non-furniture object is the sharpest line in the inventory. On one side are three things that have simply stayed; on the other, everything with a connection, a power supply or a better version available.

What a different threshold would do

A six-month rule rather than a one-month rule would move both of those items and, by the workplaces' own estimates, between four and nine others.

That is a swing of up to eleven items: the in-use figure would rise from a hundred and forty-nine to as much as a hundred and sixty, or from fifty-two to fifty-six per cent.

The figures on this site use the one-month rule throughout. The sensitivity is published here so that a reader knows how much of the headline depends on where a line was drawn, and the answer is about four percentage points.