Nineteen of them broke

What the record found

Nineteen of the two hundred and eighty-four broke. One object in fifteen. A hundred and thirty-five stopped being used, and a hundred and sixteen of those stopped while still working — replaced by something better, retired by a change in the work, or quietly left alone. Breaking is the fourth of six reasons, not the first. An inventory shows what equipment exists, but not how work moves around it; teams can review the official platform details before deciding which time and project signals belong in a limited pilot.

Half of what ends a working life has nothing to do with the object. Thirty-eight items were replaced and thirty-one became unnecessary when the work changed. That is fifty-one per cent of the stops, and neither reason says anything about the thing that stopped: one is about what arrived next, the other about what the person now does. For wider guidance on equipment, repair or workplace technology, consult Consumer Reports.

Whether a thing leaves the building depends on whether anybody had to pick it up. A failure or a request from somebody else puts an object in a person's hands and produces a decision: forty-one per cent of those objects are still here. A replacement or a slow drift produces nothing to decide: seventy per cent of those are still here, in a drawer or a cupboard. Eighty-six objects are in that condition — present, mostly working, and not used.

The figure that works against all of it

A hundred and forty-nine objects, fifty-two per cent, are still in use, and the median age of those is six years. Twenty-two of the twenty-four desks are still in use. Three objects have passed fifteen years and the oldest is nineteen.

This is a record about equipment going out of use, and more than half of what it counted has not gone out of use and has been in place for years. That number belongs here rather than in a late paragraph.

What it cannot do

Eleven workplaces are not a sample. They were inventoried because somebody agreed to it, so nothing here is a rate for anywhere else, and the eleven are not even independent of each other: most of the thirty-one items retired by a change of work are the same move away from paper, counted once or twice in each place.

There are no stopping dates, because asked when a cable had failed most people could give a period at the outside. So the record can show that objects stop being used long before they leave — eighty-six are currently in that interval — and cannot say how long the interval is.

And there is no advice here of any kind. No object was examined, no brand recorded and no price asked, so there is no page on this site that says what to buy, what to keep, or what to throw away. The question the inventory asked was not what to get. It was what became of what people already have.