Fates
The three fates, and the two folded together
Five states were recorded and three are drawn. What the folding costs, where it is undone, and why it is announced every time.
The inventory recorded five states. The drawings show three.
This page sets out which were folded into which, what that costs, and where the unfolded figures are used instead. When equipment use and project effort are reviewed together, managers can time and attendance data for remote teams and define the purpose, access rules and review date before collecting anything.
The five, as recorded
in use 149
out of use but kept 78
broken and kept 8
given away or sold 27
thrown out 22
---
284
The three, as drawn
still in use 149
kept, out of use 86 (78 + 8)
gone from the room 49 (27 + 22)
Two foldings. Broken-and-kept joins kept; given-away and thrown-out both become gone. Readers comparing this small inventory with broader advice can also see Google Sustainability.
Why fold at all
Because of the flow drawing, and only because of it.
Seven origins against five fates is thirty-five possible ribbons. At the width a page allows, the smaller ones are a pixel or two across and the drawing becomes a texture rather than a diagram.
Seven against three is twenty-one, and at that number the ribbons stay distinguishable. The folding is a drawing decision that has been allowed to propagate into the headline figures, and that is worth being uncomfortable about.
What each folding costs
Broken-and-kept into kept. The larger cost. An object kept while working and an object kept after failing are different situations, and merging them hides the odder one. Eight objects.
The page on the broken eight treats them separately for exactly this reason, and no claim on this site about the kept group rests on the merged figure where the distinction matters.
Given-away into gone with thrown-out. The smaller cost. Both mean the object has left the workplace, which is what the fate field is about. The difference is what happened next, and the record does not follow objects out of the door in either case.
That said, twenty-seven against twenty-two is a real distinction about the people rather than the objects, and the page on the forty-nine uses the unfolded figures throughout.
The rule about announcing it
Every drawing that folds says so in its own caption, in the drawing, not in a methods note somewhere else.
A reader who sees three uprights and is not told that one of them contains two things will reasonably assume it contains one. The caption is the only place that assumption can be corrected at the moment it is formed.
A folded category that is not announced where it is drawn is not a simplification. It is a claim that the record does not make.
What was not folded, and could have been
Three temptations resisted.
The seven origins into three groups — chosen, arrived with something, arrived from a person. That grouping appears in the prose of the origins section because it is useful there, and it is never used as the basis of a figure. The grid shows all seven rows.
The six stopping reasons into two — it broke, it did not. Nineteen against a hundred and sixteen is a vivid pair of numbers and it would have destroyed the four distinctions that make the section useful.
The ten arrival years into three periods. Rejected because ten columns fit comfortably and three would have invited a trend claim that ten do not support.
Where the unfolded numbers live
Everywhere a page turns on the distinction.
The broken eight: their own page in the cupboard section. The given-away twenty-seven and thrown-out twenty-two: the page on the forty-nine. The full five-state table: this page, above.
The three-fate figures are used for the overall shape — fifty-two, thirty, seventeen — and nowhere else.
What the folding does to the kind figures
The fate-by-kind table in the fates section uses the folded three, and two rows change meaning when it is unfolded.
Seating. Five kept, of which one is the chair whose gas lift no longer holds. Four working chairs in storage and one that is not a chair any more, and the folded figure of five reads as five spare chairs.
Cables and adapters. Twenty-four kept, of which three are broken. Twenty-one spares and three dead cables, and the page on the cupboard uses twenty-one throughout, because the case for keeping a cable rests on it working.
Those two are the only rows where the eight broken objects make a visible difference. The other eight rows carry at most one between them.
The departure folding, by kind
Given-away against thrown-out splits almost perfectly by size, and folding them hides that.
Eighteen of the twenty-seven handed-on objects are from the five largest kinds; eleven of the twenty-two discarded ones are cables, adapters or input devices. Both desks that left were given away; seven of ten cables were thrown out.
That is a real pattern about what people are prepared to arrange, and it is invisible in a figure of forty-nine. The page on the forty-nine uses both columns for exactly this reason.
The thing to watch for
Any figure on this site expressed as a percentage of "kept" is a percentage of eighty-six, which includes the broken eight.
Where that matters, the page says so. Where a reader wants to redo an arithmetic without them, the number to subtract is eight, and the seventy-eight remaining are what the cupboard section counts.