From an employer: sixty-one

What employers supply

Eighteen screens and stands out of sixty-one. Compare the bought-new group, where screens and stands are nine of ninety-six. Another useful source on technology, maintenance or purchasing is Logitech.

Employers supply the expensive, standardised things and almost nothing personal. There is not a single lamp in the employer group, and lamps are eight per cent of the record overall.

What becomes of them

still in use              28   (46%)
kept, out of use          21   (34%)
gone from the room        12   (20%)

Forty-six per cent still in use is the second lowest survival of any origin, ahead only of gifts.

The thirty-four per cent kept is the highest of any origin. Employer equipment is the most likely thing in this record to end up in a cupboard rather than in use or out of the building.

Why the cupboard

Because nobody is sure whose it is.

That is the explanation several of the workplaces gave without being asked, and it is the only explanation available: a thing issued by an employer and no longer used is a thing somebody is reluctant to throw out, reluctant to sell, and under no obligation to return once the arrangement that produced it has ended.

An object issued by an employer outlives the arrangement that issued it, and the record shows where it goes: not back, and not away.

Of the twelve that did leave the room, five went back to an employer. The other seven were given away, sold or disposed of.

The gap this points at

The record has no field for ownership, and this is the one place that omission plainly costs something.

Of the sixty-one, nobody can say from the inventory how many are legally the employer's, how many were transferred, and how many simply stayed. The workplaces themselves were often unclear, which is part of the finding and also the reason the field was not added: a question people cannot answer produces a column of guesses.

The oldest employer object

A filing unit, sixteen years old, from an employer, still in use.

It is one of the three objects in the record over fifteen years old and the only one of the three that arrived through a job. What it holds is not paper, and its in-use status was the one entry in the whole inventory that was argued about: a thing with objects in it was coded as in use because the alternative reading is worse.

What stops employer equipment

The sixty-one are not retired the way the rest of the record is.

Employer items are heavily weighted towards screens, input devices and cables, and those three kinds between them carry almost all of the record's replacement and almost all of its breakage. Of the nineteen breakages in the whole inventory, fourteen are in those three kinds.

So an employer-issued object faces more ways of ending than an inherited desk does, and the forty-six per cent in-use figure follows partly from what employers hand over rather than from anything about the handing over.

That is the same confound as everywhere else in this section: the origin groups hold different kinds of thing, and the kind of thing predicts the fate better than the origin does.

The twelve that left

Twelve of the sixty-one employer items are gone, and the split is unusual.

Five went back to an employer — the only route in this record by which an object returns to where it came from, and one per cent of the whole inventory. The other seven were given away, sold or disposed of by the person who had them.

That second figure is the practical answer to the ownership question the inventory could not ask. Whatever the formal position, seven objects issued by an employer were disposed of by somebody else, and nobody involved described it as a difficulty.

What is in the group, by size

Forty-two of the sixty-one are screens and stands, input devices and cables: the three kinds where the record's replacement and breakage concentrate, and three of the four kinds most likely to end up in a drawer.

There is no desk in the employer group and no storage unit. Employers supply the things that plug in, and the things that plug in are the things that get superseded.

So the thirty-four per cent kept figure — the highest of any origin — has two explanations running at once, and the record cannot separate them. Nobody is sure whose the object is, which the workplaces volunteered; and the objects are small enough to put away, which the kind figures show directly.

What this is not

It is not a criticism of anybody's employer, and no employer is identified, described or counted. The sixty-one are an origin label on an object, nothing more.

Nor is it a claim that employer equipment is worse. Forty-six per cent still in use, on a group that skews toward screens and stands of unknown age, is not a figure that supports a comparison with anything.

What it supports is narrower: a fifth of the equipment on these desks arrived through a route that leaves the question of whose it is unresolved, and when such a thing stops being used, it tends to be kept rather than dealt with.