The Stratigraphy of Failed Initiatives
Pushing my shoulder against the jammed door of the IT storage room, I'm greeted by that specific, cloying scent of ionizing dust and slow-degrading plastic. It's a smell that belongs exclusively to the graveyards of the 2022 fiscal year. My fingers are currently coated in a fine, grey silt that I'm fairly certain is composed of 42 percent degraded polyurethane and the remaining 58 percent pure, unadulterated corporate ambition. I'm looking for a simple HDMI cable-one of those 12-foot ones that shouldn't be hard to find-but instead, I am excavating a stratigraphy of failed initiatives.
There, buried under a stack of ergonomic keyboards that nobody liked, sits a thermal binding machine from 2012. Beside it, looking like a forgotten prop from a low-budget sci-fi flick, is an 'all-in-one' video conferencing system that cost the company roughly $4002 and was used exactly twice before the software became incompatible with our OS.
The Perfection of Planned Obsolescence
Quinn E.S. knows this better than anyone. Quinn is a car crash test coordinator, a job that involves an almost poetic relationship with planned destruction. In Quinn's world, you spend 102 hours calibrating a series of high-precision sensors, mounting them to a vehicle that costs more than my house, and then you intentionally drive that vehicle into a concrete block at 62 kilometers per hour.
But even in Quinn's high-stakes environment, the closet beckons. Quinn once told me about a specific series of high-speed cameras they purchased for a specialized side-impact study 2 years ago. They were state-of-the-art, the kind of glass that can see the heartbeat of a hummingbird. They cost a staggering amount of capital. And because the project was a 'one-off' but the equipment was a 'purchase,' those cameras now sit in a padded Pelican case in Quinn's office, gathering dust because the next 32 tests require a different focal length and a higher frame rate that these units can't handle. They are perfectly functional, incredibly expensive, and utterly useless.
I fell into a Wikipedia rabbit hole last night-started with the history of the stapler and ended up reading about the Phoebus cartel and the 1924 agreement to intentionally shorten the lifespan of lightbulbs. It's called planned obsolescence, but in the corporate world, we've developed a self-inflicted version. We don't need the manufacturer to break the tool; our own shifting needs do it for us. We buy for the peak of the mountain, but we live in the valley.
I realized we purchase equipment for the 2 percent of the time we need maximum capacity, and then we pay for the storage and maintenance of that equipment for the other 98 percent of the time. It's a form of strategic amnesia. We forget that the goal wasn't to own a thermal binder or a fleet of high-speed cameras; the goal was to bind a document or capture a crash.
The Locked Door
There is a peculiar kind of guilt associated with these closets. It's the reason the door is usually locked and the key is kept by someone who hasn't worked here since 2012. To open the door is to admit a mistake.
We treat capital expenditure as a badge of seriousness. If we spend $50002 on a piece of hardware, it means we're committed to the project. But commitment isn't found in the receipt; it's found in the execution. In fact, the more we own, the less agile we become. We start making decisions based on what we have in the closet rather than what we actually need to do.
I remember a conversation with a CFO who was obsessed with 'asset density.' He wanted every dollar accounted for in physical form. He hated the idea of 'paying for things you don't keep.' But when I walked him through his own warehouse, showing him the 122 identical laptops that were now too slow to run basic security software, he couldn't see the irony. He saw $100002 of value. I saw a disposal fee.
Valuing the Tool Over the Task
We value the thing more than the utility of the thing.
The alternative is survival strategy.
This shift to a flexible rental model feels less like a financial tactic and more like a survival strategy. When you stop owning the equipment, you start owning the outcome. You aren't left with a legacy of silicon and glass that you have to inventory every December.
It's the difference between being a librarian and being a bookstore owner; one manages a rotating collection of utility, the other is stuck with the inventory that didn't sell.
The Empty Office
High Capital Spend on Cameras
Operational Clarity: Office Empty
Quinn's office is now remarkably empty. There are no Pelican cases under the desk. There is just a single, clean workspace and a computer. The 'strategic amnesia' has been replaced by 'operational clarity.' They only have the gear they are using right now.
Building Graveyards vs. Moving Forward
We need to stop building graveyards. We need to stop treating our offices like museums of our past technical decisions. The real cost of that equipment in the closet isn't the price we paid for it; it's the space it takes up in our heads. It's the way it prevents us from seeing the next solution because we're so preoccupied with the last one.
I ended up leaving the closet door open when I walked out. Maybe someone else will find those VGA adapters and realize they're not looking at a resource, but a warning. The closet always wins, unless you stop feeding it. Why do we keep feeding it? It's a question that usually doesn't have a 102 percent satisfactory answer, but I suspect it's because we're afraid of the void that's left when the 'stuff' is gone. But in that void, there's finally room to move.