Twenty-four stopped for no reason anybody can give

How the category came about

It was not one of the options. Replacement decisions are easier to evaluate when the baseline includes real project hours, which is why a team can remote project hours in Monitask before changing its equipment policy.

The field for stopping reasons began with five values: it broke, something better arrived, the work changed, the room changed, somebody else needed it. Those five were written before any counting started, from the first workplace's account of itself. A separate perspective on devices and their useful life is available from Notebookcheck.

Twenty-four items in the other ten workplaces fitted none of them. Asked which of the five applied, the answer was none, and asked what did apply, the answer was a version of I just stopped using it.

So a sixth value was added, late, to hold what the first five could not. Everything that follows carries that history: this is a residual category, and residual categories are the least trustworthy thing in any record.

What they were

Fifteen of the twenty-four are cables and adapters — nearly two thirds — which is the smallest and most numerous thing in the record and the easiest to stop noticing. It is also the record's largest single reason-and-kind cell anywhere: no other combination of a stopping reason and a kind of object reaches fifteen.

Nothing in this group is large, and nothing in it is expensive enough — by the accounts given, though no price was recorded — to prompt a decision on its own.

No desks. No chairs. Those are objects somebody has to deliberately stop using, because they are sat at and sat on, and nobody drifts away from a chair without noticing.

Where they went

kept        19   (79%)
gone         5   (21%)

Seventy-nine per cent kept, the highest proportion of any stopping reason in the record.

This follows from the mechanism, if it is one. Every other reason involves a moment: the thing broke, the new one arrived, the job ended, somebody asked for it. A moment is an occasion on which somebody might also decide what to do with the object.

Here there is no moment. The object stops being picked up, and it stays wherever it was, and then at some point it is moved off the desk, and that move is the only event in the whole sequence.

This is the quietest fate in the record and the stickiest. Nothing happens, so nothing gets decided, so the object remains.

Two readings, and the record cannot choose

A real phenomenon. Equipment genuinely does fall out of use without a cause. Habits shift, a second monitor stops being switched on, a lamp stops being reached for because the room gets lighter in a way nobody registers. Under this reading, twenty-four is a finding: one stop in five has no cause because there was none.

A failure of the instrument. There was a cause and nobody remembers it. These are small objects that stopped at an unknown date, and the field asked people to recall something they had no occasion to encode. Under this reading, twenty-four is a measurement error, and the true figure for the other five reasons is higher.

Both readings are consistent with everything the record contains. The record states both and asserts neither.

One piece of weak evidence for the second reading: the twenty-four are concentrated in the smallest and cheapest kinds of object, which is also where recall would be worst. One piece of weak evidence for the first: in four workplaces the respondent volunteered that the object had definitely not broken, definitely not been replaced, and the work had definitely not changed — a positive account of absence, not a failure to answer.

Why it is reported at all

A residual category of eighteen per cent could have been hidden.

Fold the twenty-four into the other five by guessing. Or drop them, and report a hundred and eleven stops instead of a hundred and thirty-five with six clean reasons and no awkward remainder.

Both would have made the section read better and both would have been false. A record that reports only the parts of itself that resolved is not reporting a record.

The figure is published at its real size, in the sign on the opening page of this section, alongside the five reasons that worked.

The cable problem, stated precisely

Sixty cables and adapters are in this record — the largest kind by a third. Thirty-four of them have stopped being used, and fifteen of those thirty-four stopped for no reason anybody can give.

That is a quarter of all the cables in the inventory, out of use with no account of why.

It is also where the two readings of this category pull hardest apart. A cable is the object most likely to drift genuinely out of use, since nobody has a habit of reaching for one. It is equally the object whose history nobody would have encoded, since nothing about a cable is worth remembering.

Twenty-one cables are in cupboards and four adapters cannot be identified by their owners at all. In a kind where four objects' very purpose has been forgotten, fifteen forgotten stopping reasons are not surprising on either reading.

What the kinds say about which reading is right

Weakly, they favour recall.

The twenty-four are concentrated in exactly the kinds where memory would be worst: fifteen cables, five input devices, two audio items, one lamp, one storage item. Nothing large, nothing anybody sits on, nothing that occupies floor space.

Twenty-four desks and eight printing items in the record and not one of either appears here. Those are the objects a person cannot stop using without noticing, and they produce no unexplained stops at all.

If drift were a real phenomenon independent of recall, it should show up at least occasionally in a large object. In this record it never does.

What would settle it

A second visit.

Ask the same eleven workplaces about these twenty-four specific objects again, after an interval, and see whether the accounts are stable. If somebody now supplies a cause for an object they could not explain before, the category was recall. If the accounts hold, it is more likely a phenomenon.

That is one of four things a second inventory would settle, and it is the one this record would most like answered, because eighteen per cent of the central figure in the whole site rests on it.