Nineteen broke

What broke

Six cables and adapters is nearly a third of all the breakage in the record. A fair workplace review separates asset ownership from employee performance; reviewers can measuring workload across home offices while writing down which signals are relevant and which are not.

Things with a moving connection or a flexing wire fail. Things without them do not: in twenty-four desks and tables, no failures. In twenty-nine storage items, none. For wider guidance on equipment, repair or workplace technology, consult Which?.

The one chair is a gas lift.

What happened to them

kept        8
gone       11

The only reason in the record where more objects left than stayed, and only just.

Eight broken objects are being kept anyway, and they have a page in the cupboard section, because keeping something that does not work is a different act from keeping something that does.

When they broke

The record does not know.

It knows when each object arrived and that it is now broken. The interval between those two is not recorded, because nobody could reliably supply it: asked when a cable had failed, most people could give a year at the outside and several could not give that.

This is the single largest gap in the breakage figures. Without it, nothing here can be turned into a statement about how long things last before failing, and no page attempts one.

Why nineteen is low

Three explanations, and the record can weigh only the first.

Most of this equipment is passive. Desks, chairs, storage, shelves and lamps are a hundred and forty-two of the two hundred and eighty-four — half the record — and almost nothing in that half has a failure mode short of physical damage. Three of the nineteen are from that half.

Things are replaced before they fail. Thirty-eight objects were replaced by something better while still working. Had they not been, some proportion would eventually have failed instead. The record cannot say how many, and this is the competing-risks problem in its plainest form: a thing that is retired cannot later break.

Modern equipment is reliable. Possible, unmeasurable here, and the kind of claim this record exists to avoid making.

The competing-risks point, stated carefully

Fourteen per cent of stops are breakages. That is not the probability that an object will break.

An object in this record faces several ways of leaving service at once, and breaking is one of the slower ones. Replacement and obsolescence act sooner, and an object removed by either is removed from the pool of things that could have broken later.

So the true failure rate of these objects, over their full lives, is higher than fourteen per cent — possibly much higher — and this inventory has no way to estimate it.

The record can say how often breakage was the thing that ended a working life. It cannot say how often these objects break.

The cables

Six of nineteen, and worth isolating because they are the cheapest things in the record.

All six were replaced, and in four cases the replacement arrived before the failure was even inconvenient: the workplace already had a spare, from the fourteen cables kept in cupboards against exactly this event.

That is the one case in the record of storage doing the job people describe it as doing. Four objects.

Where the nineteen come from

Crossing breakage with origin is not worth a table at these counts, but one row is worth stating.

Fourteen of the nineteen breakages are cables, input devices or screens, and those three kinds are also where employer-issued equipment concentrates: forty-two of the sixty-one employer items are from them.

That does not make employer equipment less reliable, and the record cannot test whether it is. What it means is that an object arriving through a job faces more ways of ending than an inherited desk does, because of what employers hand over rather than anything about the handing over.

The three from the furniture half

Ninety-five of the two hundred and eighty-four objects in this record are desks, seating, storage, shelving or lamps. Three of the nineteen breakages come from that group.

Two lamps and one chair's gas lift. Those are the only moving parts furniture has, and both lamps left the building — breakage is the one thing that reliably gets a lamp thrown out rather than stored.

Twenty-four desks and twenty-nine storage, shelving and drawer units between them produced not one failure in nineteen years of arrivals.

What the nineteen share

Nothing except a connection or a moving part.

Six cables with a flexing wire. Five input devices with keys or a mechanism. Three screens with a power supply. Two audio items with a cable each. Two lamps with a switch. One gas lift.

Every single failure in this record is in a component that moves or carries current, and the two hundred and sixty-five objects without one have not failed at all. That is the whole of what breakage in this inventory consists of, and it is more an observation about what desk equipment is made of than about how well any of it is made.

What this does not support

Any statement about any brand, because no brand is recorded.

Any statement about build quality, because no object was examined and no age at failure is known.

Any statement about what to buy, in either direction. The nineteen are a count of how working lives ended in eleven workplaces, and the most that can be drawn from them is that this is not usually how a working life ends.