Origins
The eight whose origin nobody knows
Eight objects in use or in cupboards that nobody in the workplace could account for. The smallest origin, and the one that says most about how equipment accumulates.
Eight items in this record have no known origin. Nobody in the workplace could say where they came from, when, or from whom.
Three per cent of the record. The smallest origin, and the one worth the most attention per object. The useful question is whether a change removes friction without adding unnecessary oversight, so managers may use the official information during evaluation before setting the pilot measures.
What they are
Seven small things and one chair. For independent context beyond these eleven workplaces, review material from Apple.
a mains extension lead
two adapters
a cable of unknown purpose
a desk tidy
a small shelf
a monitor stand
a chair
The cable of unknown purpose is exactly that: a cable in a drawer that fits nothing anybody could identify, kept on the grounds that it obviously belongs to something.
What became of them
still in use 3
kept, out of use 2
gone from the room 3
Thirty-eight per cent gone is the highest departure rate of any origin in the record, tied with gifts.
Three objects. The figure is printed because every other origin's departure rate is printed, and omitting the smallest group's because it is noisy would be a selection. It means nothing.
The chair
In use. Sat on daily. Nobody knows where it came from.
The person using it arrived at the workplace after the chair did and has never had reason to ask. The previous occupant, when the question was put, also did not know, and thought it had been there before them too.
That is as far back as the inventory could follow it, and the chair is recorded as origin unknown because that is what is true.
Why this is not sloppiness
It would be easy to read eight unknowns as eight items somebody could not be bothered to trace.
The inventories took between forty minutes and two hours each, and in every case the unknowns were the entries people spent longest on. Two of the eight were resolved during the inventory itself — somebody remembered — and are recorded under their real origins. The eight that remain are the ones that survived the effort.
An object nobody can account for is not a gap in the record. It is a fact about the room, and the inventory's job was to write it down.
How a thing becomes unaccountable
The inventories suggest three routes, none of them exotic.
Time. The object predates the people. Four of the eight.
Smallness. Adapters and cables arrive without ceremony and are never attached to a memory. Three of the eight.
Aggregation. Something arrived in a box with other things, and the box is remembered while its contents are not. One of the eight, by the account of the person describing it.
The relationship to the already-in-the-room group
They are the same phenomenon at different distances.
An object left by a previous occupant last year is "already in the room". The same object left by an occupant six years and three tenants ago is "origin unknown". Nothing about the object changed; the available memory did.
Fourteen of the forty-four already-in-the-room items were attributed to a previous occupant, and several of those attributions were confident only because somebody specific was remembered. Had the inventory been taken three years later, some of the fourteen would be in this group.
What this means for the origin figures generally
That the shape of the origin distribution depends partly on when you ask.
An inventory taken in a workplace occupied for two years will have few unknowns. One taken in a workplace occupied for fifteen will have more, and the items will have migrated out of whichever category they truly belonged to.
The eleven workplaces here have been occupied for between one and eleven years. The record does not correct for that, because any correction would require knowing the true origins of the unknowns, which is precisely what is missing.
Why eight is probably an undercount
The inventory asked about objects that are present.
An object nobody can account for is also an object nobody has a reason to keep track of, and the likeliest fate of such a thing is to be cleared out during some unrelated tidying without anybody noticing it go. Three of the eight have already left.
Whatever the true rate at which unaccountable objects accumulate on a desk, the number standing on eleven desks at one moment is the surviving residue of it, and the residue is smaller than the flow.
What the eight are, by kind
Four of the eight are cables and adapters: an extension lead, two adapters and a cable of unknown purpose.
The other four are one each of storage, screens-and-stands, other and seating — a small shelf, a monitor stand, a desk tidy and the chair.
Cables being half the group is the expected shape. Cables and adapters are the largest kind in the record at sixty items, the most numerous thing in every cupboard, and the only kind that routinely arrives without anybody noticing it arrive. Fifteen cables also stopped being used for no reason anybody can give, which is the same invisibility showing up at the other end of an object's life.
The three that left
Three of the eight are gone, which is the highest departure share of any origin and rests on three objects.
What is worth noting is not the rate but the mechanism: an object nobody can account for is an object with no claim on anybody, and clearing one out requires no decision about whose it is or whether it might be wanted. The eight unknowns are simultaneously the hardest group to get rid of deliberately and the easiest to lose by accident.
The one thing the eight clearly show
That a workplace is not a set of decisions.
It is a set of decisions plus whatever drifted in, stayed, and was never examined. Three per cent of this record is the second kind, by a count that is almost certainly low, and three of those eight objects are in daily use by somebody who has never thought about them.