What is fixed
Sockets, three endings and a long cable
The smallest named cause in the record, the cheapest to have got right at the point of building, and the most expensive to fix afterwards.
Three endings are power: a socket, a cable, a battery. It is the smallest named cause in the record apart from the single unexplained entry.
Three is a small number and this page exists because of what it sits next to. The practical question is whether a change improves completed work without creating unnecessary surveillance, which is why reviewers may consider whether this setup fits before choosing a baseline and access policy.
The three
One is a laptop at four per cent in a room with the nearest socket behind a bed. The wider design and work context can also be checked through UBC.
One is a cable that would not reach from a kitchen counter to the only socket in the kitchen, logged on a day when the household had cleared the dining table for something else.
One is an extension lead needed in another room, which is arguably the elsewhere ending wearing a different word.
The ten that belong together
Five of the seven elsewhere endings involved something electrical: a charger, a cable, a second device, headphones, a lamp.
Put those five beside these three and the record contains ten endings — just over a tenth of the named total — where what went wrong is that a thing needing power was not where the person was.
| cause | n | electrical |
|---|---|---|
| power | 3 | 3 |
| elsewhere | 7 | 5 |
Ten of ninety-four. Not large, and the only group in the record where the remedy is both obvious and cheap: a second charger, a longer lead, a four-way extension.
The decision underneath
Socket position is first-fix electrical work. At the point of construction an extra double socket costs a modest sum and placing it on one wall rather than another costs nothing at all.
Afterwards it costs a tradesman, a day, and in a rented dwelling a conversation with somebody who has no reason to say yes.
A decision worth a few pounds when the wall was open, and worth a morning's work and a landlord's permission once it was closed.
That asymmetry is the whole point of this page, and it is why three endings earn one. The other three fixed constraints are expensive or impossible in both directions. This one was nearly free in one direction and awkward in the other.
Why it is the smallest cause
Because households solve it.
The remedy for a socket in the wrong place is a cable, and cables are cheap and nobody logs buying one. Eight of the nine dwellings almost certainly contain at least one extension lead bought for exactly this reason, and none of that is in the record because the sheet asked what ended a sitting, not what prevented one from ending.
The three that remain are the residue after the obvious fix has already been applied. A record of this cause before anybody owned an extension lead would look quite different, and that record does not exist.
What it says about the assumption
A dwelling's electrical layout encodes an assumption about where people will be and what they will be doing. Sockets cluster where a television goes, where a bed goes, where a kettle goes.
None of those is where somebody works, because until recently nobody worked there. A spare room specified as a spare room gets the sockets a spare room needs, which is one or two, usually behind where the bed goes.
That is not a mistake. It is a specification matching its brief, and the brief has changed.
The limit of what three can carry
Three endings in forty-five person-days cannot support any claim about electrical specification in general, and none is made.
What they can do is sit alongside the five electrical elsewhere endings and mark a category — objects needing power, not where the person is — that is small, cheaply addressed, and the only part of this record where a household's own money would reliably buy an improvement.
Everything larger than it in the ninety-four is either out of reach or free.
Where the three were
One in a bedroom, one in a kitchen, one on a landing.
None of the three is at a place the household had set up for work, which is not surprising: a place somebody arranged deliberately is a place where somebody has already solved the power question, usually by putting the desk where the socket is.
That is a small observation with a consequence. The power ending is a property of improvised and secondary places, and the record's improvised places are produced by other endings. So a socket ending is often two steps downstream: the table was wanted, the person went to the landing, and the landing has no socket.
Two of the three fit that sequence exactly.
The remedy nobody logged
A household asked, at the end of the week, what they had done about any of this would mostly say: bought a longer cable, at some point in the past, and forgotten about it.
The record cannot see any of that, and the three remaining endings are what is left after everybody has already done the obvious thing. A study that caught the purchases would find this category much larger and much more clearly solved.