Lars is a furniture restorer who works out of a drafty brick unit in East London. He spends most of his time stripping layers of lead paint off Victorian chairs, but he has a strange rule that has nothing to do with wood.

If a tool requires more than three minutes of calibration before it can make a cut, he throws it in the scrap bin. He once told me that a tool that demands an apology before it works is not a tool; it is a ghost you have invited to live in your workshop. He would rather use a hand saw that is blunt than a power saw that needs its fence adjusted every time the wind changes.

The Ghost in the Supply Cupboard

I thought about Lars last week when I walked past the supply cupboard on the second floor of a mid-sized insurance firm. The door was propped open with a stack of old phone books. Inside, sitting on a shelf between a box of generic envelopes and a dead orchid, was a plastic card printer from 2011.

It had a fine layer of grey dust on its lid, but the little green light on the front was glowing with a steady, expensive persistence.

This is the hidden tax of the inherited task. We like to think that businesses are rational machines that make “make-or-buy” decisions based on spreadsheets, unit costs, and strategic focus. We assume that if a company is printing its own ID badges, it is because some clever person in procurement sat down, ran the numbers, and decided that owning the hardware was 14% cheaper than outsourcing.

But that is almost never how it happens.

The Evolution of a Burden

In reality, that printer was bought for a specific project during the London Olympics or a software migration that happened a decade ago. The person who bought it had a budget for that specific moment. When the project ended, the printer stayed. It became part of the furniture.

When the original operator moved on to a better job, the task of “making the badges” didn’t get re-evaluated. It simply drifted down the hallway like a lost balloon until it snagged on the desk of an office administrator named Sarah.

Sarah now spends every second Thursday losing four hours to that machine. She has to wrestle with a ribbon that costs $84 and snaps if the room is too humid. She has to bin six cards for every one that comes out with the logo centered. She has to call a technical support line that has a recorded message saying they stopped supporting this model in 2019.

The company isn’t saving money. If you factored in Sarah’s salary, the cost of the wasted PVC, and the sheer psychic toll of fighting a piece of hardware that belongs in a museum, each badge probably costs $42. You could get them manufactured factory-direct for a fraction of that, with better finishes and embedded chips that actually work.

But the $42 isn’t a line item. It is buried in the “Salaries” column of the P&L, invisible and silent.

Holding the Flap Down

I used to be very smug about these kinds of inefficiencies. I thought I was too smart to let a cupboard-ghost dictate my schedule. Then I realized I have been doing the exact same thing with my own digital life.

I have spent the last three years manually resizing images for a newsletter using a clunky, outdated desktop app because I “already own it,” despite the fact that a $9-a-month subscription would do it in three seconds.

I was protecting the $9 while litigating away hours of my life that I will never get back. I was the one holding the flap down so the ribbon wouldn’t jam.

We inherit these burdens because the “buy” decision requires a signature, but the “keep doing it ourselves” decision is the default state of rest. To stop using the printer, Sarah would have to find a new vendor, get them approved by legal, set up a payment profile, and explain to her boss why they are “spending more money” on something they used to do for free.

In the twisted logic of corporate accounting, Sarah’s time is free because it’s already paid for. The vendor’s invoice is an “extra” cost.

Friction and Security

This is why the boundary of what a firm does itself is rarely drawn by logic. It is drawn by the path of least resistance. We keep the old tech because the friction of replacing it is higher than the friction of suffering through it.

We stay with the 125KHz low frequency cards because that’s what the reader on the front door was designed for in 2004, even though we now need the encrypted security of a modern chip architecture.

“I once spent forty minutes on a video call with my camera on by mistake, while I was trying to fix a paper jam in my own home printer. My colleagues watched me talk to a piece of plastic as if it were a disobedient dog.”

– A Moment of Vulnerability

It was a moment of profound vulnerability, not because they saw my messy home office, but because they saw the pathetic nature of my relationship with technology. I was subservient to a device I had bought to serve me.

When you look at the supply chain for something as seemingly simple as an ID card or a hotel key, the “make” side of the equation is full of these hidden traps. You aren’t just buying the plastic; you are buying the maintenance, the technical debt, and the Thursday afternoons of your most organized employees.

Solving the “Flap” Problem

A company like WXR exists because they have solved the “flap” problem.

They have moved the production from a dusty cupboard to a factory floor where the unit cost is the actual cost. There are no hidden salary lines or biro-scribbled instructions there. There is just the output.

If you want to find out where your company is actually losing its edge, don’t look at the quarterly reports. The reports only show you what you decided to spend. Instead, go to the second floor. Look for the cupboard with the door propped open. Look for the person who is staring at a small LCD screen that says “Error 404: Ribbon Not Found.”

We are all holding down the flap on something. The trick is realizing that the flap doesn’t need to be held. The machine can be binned. Lars was right: if you have to apologize to the tool before it works, you are the one being used.

The real cost of that 2011 printer isn’t the electricity or the ink. It’s the fact that Sarah hasn’t had a creative idea on a Thursday afternoon in four years, because her brain is entirely occupied by the tension of a polyester ribbon that is three microns too thin for the heat of the roller.

Efficiency vs. Fear

We trade human potential for the sake of avoiding a new invoice, and we call it “efficiency” because we don’t have a better word for the fear of change.

The cupboard isn’t just a place where we store envelopes. It’s a graveyard for the decisions we never had the courage to make. Every time we walk past it, we acknowledge the ghost, we hold the flap, and we lose another afternoon to a past that should have been recycled a decade ago.

It is time to let the ribbon snap for good.