Thirteen because the room changed

What happened in each case

Three kinds of change, from the accounts given: For independent context beyond these eleven workplaces, review material from CHOICE Australia.

The six moves are five people and one shared desk. Four of the moves were within the same building, two were to a different address.

The four rearrangements are all the same situation described differently: the desk ended up against a different wall, and something that had fitted no longer fitted.

The three light cases are all lamps.

What they were

Two desks is notable. This is the only stopping reason in the record that retires a desk, and it does it twice.

A desk is the most durable thing in the inventory: twenty-four of them across eleven workplaces, two stops in total, both of them here. A desk does not break, is not improved on, and does not go out of use when the work changes, because whatever the work becomes, it is still done at a surface. The only thing that ends a desk is that the surface no longer fits the space.

The lamps

Five of the thirteen, and three of those are the light cases.

A lamp is the one object in this record whose usefulness depends entirely on where it stands. Move the desk to a wall with a window and a task lamp becomes redundant in the afternoon. Move it to a corner and the overhead light, which was adequate, stops being adequate.

Nine lamps are in cupboards across the whole record, and these three are the clearest account of how a lamp gets there: nobody decided the lamp was bad. The room acquired light from somewhere else.

Of the six stopping reasons, this is the only one where the same object in the same condition would still be in use somewhere three metres away.

Where they went

kept         7   (54%)
gone         6   (46%)

Fifty-four per cent kept — the second lowest in the record, after breakage.

This is the only drift-type reason that produces departures at near the rate of an event-type reason, and the explanation is the moves. A move is the one occasion on which somebody handles every object they own and has to decide, for each one, whether it goes in the van.

Of the six objects that stopped because a desk moved, four did not make the move. Of the seven that stopped because of a rearrangement or the light, two left.

Moving as the only audit anybody performs

This is worth stating as its own finding, because it bears on the cupboard section.

Across eleven workplaces and two hundred and eighty-four objects, the record contains no instance of anybody deliberately reviewing their equipment and deciding what to get rid of. Not once.

What it contains instead is six moves, and the moves did the work that a review would have done. A person packing a desk is forced into exactly the decision that nobody ever makes voluntarily, about every object at once, under time pressure.

Four of the eighty-six kept items that would otherwise still be kept are gone because somebody had to carry them.

That is a small number, and the mechanism behind it is the most reliable disposal process in the entire record.

Why thirteen is small

Because rooms do not change often, and because this reason competes with the others.

A move retires only the objects that specifically do not fit the new room. Everything else moves with the desk and keeps working, which is why six moves produced six stops rather than sixty.

The three light cases are rarer still: they require the room to change in a way that affects a particular object without affecting anything else.

So thirteen is what it looks like — an uncommon cause, correctly small, and included because leaving out the small reasons would make the large ones look larger.

The storage that went with the rooms

Three of the thirteen are storage or shelving, and all three left the building.

They are the only storage objects in the record to leave for this reason, and they are three of the four storage objects that left at all. Shelving is fitted to a wall or a corner; when the wall changes it has nowhere to be, and unlike a tray it is too large to put in a cupboard.

That makes storage the one kind in the inventory that splits cleanly by cause. Seven storage items stopped because the work changed and all seven are in cupboards. Three stopped because the room changed and all three are gone.

The two screens

Two screens stopped because the room changed, one kept and one gone, and they are worth a sentence because screens stop for five different reasons in this record and this is the smallest of the five.

A screen is the most portable substantial object on a desk. It moves with the desk, fits most walls and surfaces, and almost never fails to suit a new room. Two of twenty-one screen stops is what that looks like.

Compare the five lamps, out of twelve lamp stops. A lamp depends entirely on where it stands and a screen hardly at all, and that difference is most of what this stopping reason measures.

What the record cannot see

Whether the move was the cause or the occasion. Four objects were disposed of during a move. Some of those might have been disposed of anyway, and the move only set the date. The record cannot separate the two.

What the rooms were like. No workplace is described, located or photographed, which is a rule of the method rather than an oversight, and it means nothing here can be checked against a floor plan.

How many moves happened without retiring anything. The record counts stops, so a move in which every object survived leaves no trace in this section at all. There may have been several.