The cell that is a fifth of the record

Why it is the only certain cell

In every other cell, something is unclear. An inventory shows what equipment exists, but not how work moves around it; teams can look at the service before choosing metrics before deciding which time and project signals belong in a limited pilot.

An object that came with a room and is still in use may be useful or may be immovable. An object issued by an employer and now in a cupboard may be unwanted or may be unreturnable. A gift that has gone may have been passed on gladly or quietly disposed of. A separate perspective on devices and their useful life is available from NRDC.

In this one cell both ends are known. Somebody looked at the thing, decided, paid, and is still using it years later.

Fifty-seven objects where the choosing and the outcome are both visible. For the other two hundred and twenty-seven, one end or the other is a guess.

What they are

Cables ahead, then input devices, then lamps — small things, mostly.

The lamps are worth separating. Eight of the record's ten in-use lamps were bought new by the person using them, the highest such proportion of any kind, and there is not a single lamp anywhere in the record that came from an employer. Lighting is the one thing on these desks that people reliably buy for themselves.

When they arrived

2007–2013     6
2015–2019    19
2021–2025    32

Weighted toward recent years, which every surviving group is: a thing bought last year has had less time to stop being used than a thing bought in 2011.

The six from 2007 to 2013 are the interesting end. Two desks, a chair, a lamp, a drawer unit and an extension lead — all furniture or passive electrical, none with moving parts or a circuit board.

What this cell does not prove

That buying new is better.

The comparison that would show it is between this cell and the other origins, and the page on the chosen and the not-chosen sets out why that comparison fails: the groups differ in kind, in age and in who was choosing, all at once.

Fifty-nine per cent of bought-new items are in use. Fifty-nine per cent of already-in-the-room items are too, and most of those are furniture nobody can be bothered to move.

The two figures are identical and mean entirely different things, which is a good demonstration of why a survival percentage on its own settles nothing.

What it does show

That a fifth of the equipment on these desks is the result of a deliberate purchase that has worked out.

That is a modest and genuinely positive finding, and it is the only cell in the grid that supports one. A record built around things falling out of use should say clearly where things have not.

The cell beside it

Twenty-seven items bought new and now in a cupboard.

Those twenty-seven are the other half of the deliberate-purchase story: chosen, paid for, used, and now idle. Thirteen of them stopped because something better arrived; seven because the work changed.

Set against fifty-seven, that is roughly two deliberate purchases still working for every one in a drawer — and twelve more that have left the room entirely.

For every three things somebody chose and bought new, two are still in use. That is the most useful single ratio in the record for anybody about to buy something, and it is not advice: it is what happened to ninety-six objects in eleven workplaces.

What the cell is not made of

Two kinds are nearly absent from it, and both absences are informative.

Seating: two. Only two of the twenty chairs in this record were bought new by the person sitting on them. The other eighteen arrived from an employer, with a room, second-hand, handed on, or in one case from nobody anybody can identify.

Chairs are the object the whole discussion of desk equipment revolves around, and in eleven workplaces almost nobody bought their own.

Printing and scanning: one. Eight such items in the record, six of them gone, and one bought new and still in use.

Against that, fourteen cables and adapters, which is the largest group in the cell. The single most common deliberate purchase on these desks that is still doing its job is a cable.

The two halves of the bought-new group

Ninety-six objects bought new. Fifty-seven in use, twenty-seven kept, twelve gone.

The twenty-seven are not failures of judgement. Thirteen of them stopped because something better arrived and seven because the work changed — twenty of twenty-seven where nothing about the object went wrong and nothing about the purchase was mistaken.

So of ninety-six deliberate purchases, the number that could be read as having disappointed anybody is small and the record cannot identify which they are. The one case it can identify is the keyboard abandoned after two months because the person did not get on with it, and the field has no value for that: it is coded as replaced.

Why the grid is outlined rather than shaded

The drawing marks this cell with an outline and leaves the other twenty alone.

A shaded grid — darker for larger — reads as a continuous scale and implies that the differences between cells are measured on one. They are not; they are counts of objects in categories, and the only comparison the drawing is prepared to assert is which single cell is biggest.

One outline makes that one claim. A heat map would make twenty-one.