Six reasons a thing stops

The six reasons

Breaking is fourth of six.

The figure most people expect to be first

Put the question to somebody before they look at the record — why does desk equipment stop being used — and the first answer is that it breaks.

It is fourteen per cent of the stops and seven per cent of the whole inventory. One object in fifteen.

The other hundred and sixteen stopped while still working, and that is the finding this section exists for.

Equipment on these desks almost never fails. It stops being reached for, which is a different thing and happens five times as often.

The two largest are both about something else

Replaced by something better: 38. The object did nothing wrong. A newer one arrived and took the job.

The work changed: 31. The object did nothing wrong either. The thing it was for no longer happens.

Sixty-nine of the hundred and thirty-five — more than half — are cases where the stop says nothing about the object at all. It says something about what arrived next, or about what the person now does.

The one with no explanation

Twenty-four objects stopped being used and nobody can say why.

Not "it broke", not "something replaced it", not "the work changed". They were used, and then they were not, and the person using them cannot identify a moment or a cause.

Eighteen per cent of the stops. A page of its own, because an unexplained category of that size is either a real phenomenon or a failure of the instrument, and the record cannot tell which.

What happens afterwards

The grid above crosses the six reasons with what became of the object.

Two rows stand out.

It broke: 8 kept, 11 gone. The only reason where more objects left than stayed. Broken things are the one category that reliably prompts somebody to act, and even then eight were kept.

Stopped being reached for: 19 kept, 5 gone. The opposite. An object that stopped for no reason almost never leaves, because there is no moment at which anybody decides anything about it.

The pattern across the grid

Reasons that involve an event — it broke, somebody else needed it — produce departures. Reasons that involve a drift — it stopped being reached for, the work changed — produce cupboards.

event-driven reasons (broke, needed)      12 kept, 17 gone
drift-driven reasons (the other four)     74 kept, 32 gone

Twenty-nine objects stopped because something happened, and more than half of those left. A hundred and six stopped because something gradually stopped happening, and seventy per cent of those are still in the building.

That is the clearest structural finding in the record and it follows from something simple: a thing that breaks presents itself for a decision, and a thing that quietly stops being used never does.

The reasons by kind

Crossing the six reasons with kind gives sixty cells over a hundred and thirty-five objects, so most are empty or hold one or two. Four cells carry real weight.

cables, no reason given                15
cables, replaced by something better    10
screens, replaced by something better    9
storage, the work changed                7

Fifteen is the largest single cell anywhere in the record: cables and adapters that stopped being picked up and nobody can say when.

Three rows of the table are worth stating whole.

Desks: two stops in twenty-four objects, both because the room changed. Nothing else ends a desk. Nothing replaces one and nothing breaks.

Printing and scanning: six stops in eight objects, all because the work changed. The only kind in the record retired entirely by one cause.

Seating: six of nine stops are replacement. Chairs are superseded more readily than anything except cables and screens.

Why the kind table is the weakest in this section

Because kind was not asked for.

The origin, the arrival band, the state and the stopping reason all came from the person at the desk, from closed lists written in advance. Kind was assigned afterwards by whoever took the inventory, using ten categories settled at the pilot.

So every figure above is a count of somebody's classification rather than of somebody's answer, and a reader who would draw the line differently between storage and other is disagreeing with a judgement, not an observation. Nineteen objects ended up in other, which is the measure of how well the other nine categories fitted.

What the field cannot see

When. No date. An object that stopped in 2015 and one that stopped last month are the same entry.

Whether it was gradual. "Stopped being reached for" is a category assembled after the fact from somebody's inability to recall a cause. Some of those may have had causes that were simply forgotten.

What replaced it. The thirty-eight replaced items do not record what replaced them, so the record cannot say whether the replacement is itself in use, in a cupboard, or gone.

That last one is a genuine loss. Several of the thirty-eight were almost certainly replaced by objects that are themselves now in the kept column, and the record has no way to link them.