Ten went because somebody else needed them

What they were

Screens and chairs. The two kinds of object that somebody can be visibly short of, and that another person can therefore visibly supply. The useful question is whether a change removes friction without adding unnecessary oversight, so managers may look through the current product scope before setting the pilot measures.

Nobody handed on a cable because somebody needed one. Twenty-one cables are in cupboards, several workplaces have duplicates, and not one of them moved to a person who was short of a cable — three cables did leave these rooms, but as part of a clear-out rather than in answer to a need. That says something about how invisible small equipment is even to its owner. Readers comparing this small inventory with broader advice can also see Consumer NZ.

Where they went

kept         4   (40%)
gone         6   (60%)

Four kept out of ten is the lowest proportion in the record.

That is almost tautological: a thing given to somebody because they needed it has, by definition, left. The four in the kept column are the cases where the handover was temporary or internal — the object moved to another desk in the same workplace, and the inventory still counts it as present in the building while recording that it is no longer on the desk it was inventoried against.

That distinction is thin, and it is the thinnest place in the whole coding scheme. Two workplaces resolved borderline cases differently and both resolutions are in the figures.

Why this is counted as a stop

Because the record is organised around desks, not around objects.

The question each entry answers is what became of this thing on this desk. An object that moved to another person has stopped being part of the desk it was recorded against, even though its working life continues uninterrupted.

This is the one place where the record's unit of analysis produces a result that reads oddly. A screen passed to a colleague appears in the same column as a screen that was thrown away, and in plain terms those are not the same event at all.

The honest summary of these ten is that nothing ended. The record says they stopped, and what it means is that they left.

The other side of the same transaction

Twenty-eight objects in this record arrived because they were handed on from somebody else. Ten left for the same reason.

Those two figures describe the same kind of movement from opposite ends, and they do not match, which is informative.

Within the eleven workplaces, five of the ten departures can be matched to arrivals in the same inventory — an object that left one desk and appeared on another, counted twice, once as a fate and once as an origin. The other five went outside and the other twenty-three arrivals came from outside.

So the eleven workplaces are a net importer of second-hand equipment: twenty-three in, five out. Whatever network these desks sit in, it sends them more than they send back.

That is the only quantitative statement in this record about anything outside the eleven workplaces, and it is weak, because it depends entirely on which eleven places happened to be inventoried.

The two chairs

Both were replaced-and-then-given: a better chair arrived, the old one went to a cupboard, and some months later somebody who needed a chair took it from the cupboard.

Those chairs therefore have two stopping reasons, and the record allows only one. They are coded here, under the reason that finally removed them, and not under replacement, which is what actually ended their use on the original desk.

Four objects in the record have this problem. All four are coded by the last event, and that convention was fixed before counting began, which means the replacement figure of thirty-eight is understated by four and the figure of ten is overstated by the same.

A stopping reason that allowed two values would have caught this. The field allows one, deliberately, because a multi-valued field would have made every count in this section ambiguous, and the cost of that decision is exactly these four objects.

What nobody hands on

Four kinds in this record have never had an object leave for this reason, and the list is informative.

Desks: none of twenty-four. Nobody is short of a surface in a way that somebody else's desk solves, and moving one is work.

Lamps: none of twenty-two. Nine are in cupboards and not one went to a person who needed light.

Storage: none of twenty-nine. Seven are in cupboards.

Cables: none of sixty. Twenty-one are in cupboards.

Between them, a hundred and thirty-five objects — nearly half the record — in kinds that nobody ever handed on in answer to a need, while thirty-seven of those objects sit unused in storage.

The explanation is about visibility rather than usefulness. A person without a screen or a chair is visibly short of one, and somebody can see it and offer. A person who could use a better cable or another lamp is not visibly short of anything, so the offer never happens and the cupboard never empties.

The only kinds that move this way

Screens four, input devices three, seating two, audio one.

All four are objects a person can be seen to lack. All four are also objects that a workplace tends to have spares of, because all four are in the top half of the cupboard by count.

So this reason operates exactly where the two conditions overlap: a visible shortage, and a stored surplus. Ten objects across eleven workplaces, which is roughly one a year.

The cupboard as a supply

Six of the ten came out of storage rather than off a desk.

That is the one mechanism in this record by which a kept object returns to use, and it accounts for six objects out of eighty-six.

Seven per cent. The cupboard section puts it more bluntly: almost nothing comes back, and when it does, it is because somebody else asked.