What a fate is not

One: a fate is not a judgement

An object in a cupboard has not failed. The record here describes objects rather than output, so a distributed team may check the official workflow description and interpret operational data beside completed work and employee feedback.

Twenty-seven of the eighty-six kept items stopped being used because something better arrived. That is a successful object replaced by a more successful one, and nothing about the first one went wrong. For independent context beyond these eleven workplaces, review material from European Commission Environment.

Twenty-one more stopped because the work changed. The object is exactly as good as it was; the thing it was for no longer happens.

Between them that is forty-eight of eighty-six — more than half the cupboard — where no judgement of the object is implied at all.

Two: a fate is not a date

The state is a snapshot taken at one moment.

An item recorded as kept might have stopped being used last month or in 2014. The record has no field for when a thing stopped, because nobody was present at the moment it happened and reconstructing it afterwards produces guesses.

That missing field is the largest gap in this inventory. Without it, the record can show that objects stop being used long before they leave — eighty-six are currently in that interval — and cannot say how long the interval is.

Three: a fate is not final

Six objects in this record had been out of use and came back.

Six out of the eighty-six that are currently kept is seven per cent, and the figure is certainly an undercount: it counts only returns that somebody remembered during an inventory about something else.

Several workplaces described cupboard items as temporarily stored. The field has no way to record that, and the record treats a thing described as temporarily stored identically to a thing nobody expects to see again.

Four: a fate is not a measure of the workplace

A high kept figure does not mean a workplace is cluttered, and a high gone figure does not mean it is disciplined.

The three workplaces with the highest departure rates are the three that described their storage as full. On eleven cases that is a pattern and not a result, and the direction it points is the opposite of the moral reading: things leave when there is nowhere to put them, not when somebody decides to be tidy.

The fate of an object in this record is mostly a fact about how much space there is, and only slightly a fact about the object.

What the field does say

Three things, narrowly.

Of the equipment standing in eleven workplaces at one moment, fifty-two per cent was in use in the preceding month, thirty per cent was present and idle, and seventeen per cent had already left.

The second figure is larger than people guess. The third is smaller. Both of those are statements about expectation rather than about desks, and they are the most useful thing the state field produces.

The one-month rule, once more

In use means used in the ordinary course of the last month.

That threshold does real work: a six-month rule would move up to eleven items from kept into in use, taking the headline from fifty-two per cent to as much as fifty-six.

The one-month figure is used throughout. The sensitivity is published so that nobody has to take the headline on trust, and anybody who prefers a different threshold can see roughly what it would cost.

Five: a fate is not a property of the kind, either

The reading the record most often invites, after the four above, is that some kinds of object end up in cupboards and others do not.

That is closer to true than the origin reading, and it is still not a property of the objects.

Desks have nothing in a cupboard and printing equipment has nothing in a cupboard, and the reason in both cases is size: neither can be stored without somebody noticing. Input devices have more objects in drawers than on desks, and the reason is also size, in the other direction.

nothing kept at all        desks (24), printing (8)
more kept than in use      input devices (38)

So what looks like a fact about kinds is a fact about volume. A thing that fits in a drawer gets put in one; a thing that does not forces somebody to decide.

The one place where this is not the explanation is the broken group, where three cables, two input devices, a screen, a headset and a chair are kept for reasons that have nothing to do with how much room they take.

What the field would need to say more

A date for when each object stopped being used.

With it, every one of the four readings above could be tested. Returns could be distinguished from permanent storage by how long an object had been idle; the interval between stopping and leaving could be measured rather than demonstrated; and the state field would stop being a snapshot.

Without it, the field says where two hundred and eighty-four objects were at one moment, and this page is a list of what that cannot mean.

Why there is no "partly in use"

It was on the draft sheet and it was removed at the pilot, where it absorbed about a fifth of all items.

A category that takes a fifth of a record has stopped distinguishing anything: everything ambiguous goes into it, and the two categories either side of it become the clear cases only.

The binary rule misclassifies a small number of objects in a known direction. The three-way rule would have misclassified nothing and measured nothing.