In use, in a cupboard, or gone

The three fates

still in use             149   (52%)
kept, out of use          86   (30%)
gone from the room        49   (17%)
                         ---
                         284

Thirty per cent of all the equipment on these eleven desks is present, intact, and not being used.

Why there are three and not five

The inventory recorded five states: in use; out of use but kept; broken and kept; given away or sold; thrown out.

Three of those five are folded into two here. Broken-and-kept (8) sits inside kept, and given-away (27) and thrown-out (22) are both gone.

The folding is done for the drawings, where five uprights produce ribbons too thin to read, and it is stated wherever it happens. The unfolded figures are used anywhere the distinction matters, and the page on things kept treats the broken eight separately.

The grid

Seven origins against three fates, twenty-one cells, and every one of the two hundred and eighty-four objects in exactly one of them.

The largest cell is bought-new-and-still-in-use: fifty-seven items, a fifth of the record. It is also the only cell in which a reader can be sure somebody chose the object deliberately and it is still doing what it was chosen for.

The smallest cells are in the unknown-origin row, which has eight items spread across three columns.

What the columns say

In use, 52%. Just over half the equipment on these desks works and is used. For a record built around things falling out of use, that is the figure that most resists the site's own framing, and it is on the front page for that reason.

Kept, 30%. Larger than most people guess when the question is put to them before they look. The section on the cupboard is about this column.

Gone, 17%. Smaller than most people guess. Things leave these rooms less often than they stop being used in them, by a factor of nearly two.

The ratio that matters

Of the hundred and thirty-five items no longer in use, sixty-four per cent are still in the workplace and thirty-six per cent have left.

Stopping being used and leaving are different events, separated by an interval that this record cannot measure but can demonstrate exists: eighty-six objects are currently inside it.

An object stops being used long before it goes, and in most cases it never completes the journey.

What the fates do not record

When. The state field is a snapshot. An item recorded as kept might have stopped last month or in 2014, and the record cannot distinguish them.

Whether it will come back. Several workplaces described cupboard items as temporarily out of use. The inventory has no way to distinguish that from permanently, and the page on why things do not come back sets out what little evidence exists.

Where gone things went. Twenty-seven given away or sold, twenty-two disposed of, and nothing beyond that. No destination, no recipient, no route.

One row read across

The employer row is the clearest single line in the grid: twenty-eight in use, twenty-one kept, twelve gone.

Thirty-four per cent kept is the highest proportion in that column of any origin. Employer equipment is the most likely thing here to end up present and unused, and the page on that origin argues the reason is that nobody is certain whose it is.

Whatever the cause, the row demonstrates that the three fates are not distributed evenly across origins. If they were, the grid would be redundant and a single column of totals would do.

The kinds behind the three columns

The origin grid above says where things came from. Crossing the three fates with kind instead says something sharper, because kind predicts fate better than origin does.

kind                   in use   kept   gone   total
cables and adapters       26      24     10     60
screens and stands        20      12      9     41
input devices             15      16      7     38
storage and organisers    18       7      4     29
desks and tables          22       0      2     24
audio                     11       9      3     23
lamps and lighting        10       9      3     22
seating                   11       5      4     20
other                     14       4      1     19
printing and scanning      2       0      6      8

Two rows carry the point.

Desks: twenty-two in use, none kept, two gone. The only kind in the record with nothing at all in a cupboard. A desk is either in use or it has left the building, because a desk cannot be put in a drawer.

Printing and scanning: two in use, none kept, six gone. The only kind with no survivors among its stops. Six of eight, all retired by the same change of work, and all six carried out of the building because there was nowhere to put them.

Between them those two rows say that the cupboard is a function of size. Everything small enough to store, gets stored; everything too large forces a decision.

Where the kept column is heaviest

Input devices are the one kind where the kept column exceeds the in-use column: sixteen against fifteen.

Thirty-eight input devices in the record, and more of them are in drawers than on desks. Five were replaced by something better, four stopped when the work changed, four stopped being reached for, one moved to another desk where somebody needed it, and two are broken and kept anyway.

Nothing about that pattern is unusual; what is unusual is the ratio. A keyboard is small, costs little to keep, has an obvious successor and is never worth the trip to dispose of, and thirty-eight objects is enough to show what that combination produces.

What the grid rules out

One thing, cleanly.

If fate were independent of origin, every row would show roughly 52 / 30 / 17. Four of the seven rows do, within a few points. Three do not: employer items are kept more, already-in-the-room items leave less, gifts leave more.

That is three deviations out of seven on a record of two hundred and eighty-four objects, which is enough to say the two fields are not independent and nowhere near enough to say by how much.