Thirty-one stopped because the work changed

What they were

This is a different-looking list from every other stopping reason, and the difference is the point. For wider guidance on equipment, repair or workplace technology, consult Gizmodo.

Under replacement, the objects were screens and input devices: things that improve. Under breakage, cables and moving parts: things that fail. Here, the objects are the ones tied to a specific job — paper, calls, filing — and when the job goes, so do they, intact.

The paper group

Thirteen of the thirty-one are paper equipment: six printing and scanning items, seven trays and organisers built to hold sheets.

Across eleven workplaces, that is more than one each, and in nine of the eleven the account was the same in substance: the work stopped involving paper, and the equipment for paper stopped being touched. Nothing wrong with it. Nothing to fix. Nothing to decide.

Two workplaces still print, and their equipment is in the in-use column, so this is not universal. But as a mechanism it is the clearest thing in the section: a whole category of desk equipment retired without a single failure.

The telephones

Six desk telephones and headsets.

All six are kept and unused, and all six worked when they stopped.

The record does not say what calls are made on now, because the record does not link replacements to what they replaced, and in at least two of these cases the successor is probably an object not in the inventory at all — a personal telephone, which was explicitly out of scope for all eleven inventories.

That is a boundary worth naming. This record counts what is on the desk, and some of what used to be on the desk has moved into things nobody would call desk equipment.

Where they went

kept        21   (68%)
gone        10   (32%)

Sixty-eight per cent kept, close to the replacement figure and for the same reason: an object with nothing wrong with it resists disposal, even when the reason for owning it has evaporated.

The ten that left are mostly the large ones. All six printing and scanning items left — they were the only things in the record big enough that keeping them had a visible cost. Of the seven trays and organisers, all seven are still in cupboards, because a tray takes up no space worth noticing.

Size, not usefulness, decided which of these thirty-one actually left the building.

That is the one place in the record where a physical property of an object predicts its fate, and it predicts it better than anything about how the object arrived or what it was for.

Why this reason is invisible in advance

Nobody buys a desk telephone expecting the work to stop involving calls. The failure mode here is not in the object and cannot be anticipated by examining it.

Which means that the two largest reasons a thing stops being used in this record — something better arrived, and the work changed — are both entirely outside the object. Sixty-nine of a hundred and thirty-five stops, fifty-one per cent, carry no information whatever about the thing that stopped.

That matters for how anybody reads a record like this one. Half of what looks like equipment turning over is not about equipment.

The eleven workplaces are not independent here

One caution the record has to enter against itself.

The change of work that retired the paper equipment is the same change in most of the eleven workplaces: a general move away from printing that happened across the whole period the inventories cover.

So thirty-one is not thirty-one independent events. It is closer to three or four broad shifts — paper, calls, filing — appearing once or twice in each workplace. An inventory of eleven places that all experienced the same decade will count the same decade eleven times.

None of the figures in this section should be read as though the workplaces were drawn separately from anything.

The one kind retired entirely

Printing and scanning is the only kind in the record with no stopping reason except this one.

Eight such objects. Six stopped, all six because the work changed, and all six left the building — five given away, one disposed of. The two survivors are in the two workplaces that still print.

No printing item in this record was ever replaced by a better one, broke, or stopped for any other cause. The category was retired by a change in what the work is, and it is the clearest single case in the inventory of a stopping reason operating on a whole kind at once.

And the kind it cannot touch

Storage and organisers is the mirror image: twenty-nine objects, eleven stops, and seven of those eleven are this reason.

But where printing left, storage stayed. All seven of the work-changed storage items are in cupboards, and the cupboard holds seven storage objects in total — the entire group.

Same cause, same decade, opposite outcome, and the only difference is that a tray fits on a shelf and a printer does not.

printing, retired by the work:   6 stops, 0 kept, 6 gone
storage, retired by the work:    7 stops, 7 kept, 0 gone

Thirteen objects, one cause, and a clean split by size with nothing in between.

What the record cannot see

What the work became. The field recorded that the work changed, not into what. Several accounts supplied a description and none was asked for consistently, so none is counted.

Whether anything replaced the function. Printing did not stop being needed in every case; in three workplaces it moved to a shared machine elsewhere in the building, which no inventory covered.

When. As everywhere, no date.

Whether the object could be used for something else. A tray is a tray. Some of the twenty-one kept items are presumably reusable for an unrelated purpose, and nobody is reusing them, but the record has no field that would show the difference between an object that cannot be repurposed and one that simply has not been.