A loss rate steady enough to budget for

Thirty hair elastics, identical, arranged in a strict grid — six across, five down. Twenty-seven are drawn as empty outlines, nothing inside. Three are filled solid, scattered through the grid, never touching, never in a corner.

Ten to one. Not an unlucky week; the usual result.

What does a grid show that one missing elastic on its own wouldn't?

A rate, rather than an incident.

One elastic gone is a small annoyance with an obvious, forgettable cause — it fell out, it snapped, it's somewhere in a coat pocket. Thirty laid out with only three surviving removes the individual excuse from each one and leaves the pattern behind it: this is not a run of bad luck across a term, it is what happens to this object at this rate, every term, regardless of which ones specifically go.

Why draw the twenty-seven missing ones instead of just showing the three that made it back?

Because the twenty-seven are most of what actually happened, and leaving them off would understate it.

Three filled shapes on their own would read as a small, tidy design about three elastics. Twenty- seven hollow outlines around them is what turns it into an account: every one of those outlines is a specific elastic that went out in a bag one morning and simply never made the return trip. The outlines are there to be counted, not to be pretty.

Why three, and not zero?

Because the three survivors never actually left the house.

They're the ones still in a drawer, still tangled in a hairbrush, still on a bedside table the morning everyone else went out — spared by staying home, not by making it back through a school day intact. Zero would suggest nothing at all comes back, which overstates it. Three is close enough to zero to be the point, without pretending the rate is total.

Why do the three filled shapes sit apart, never touching, never in a corner?

Because a random result shouldn't be drawn as though somebody arranged it.

If the three survivors were grouped together or lined up along one edge, the grid would start reading as a pattern with a shape to it — a smiley face, an arrow, something composed — rather than as thirty independent outcomes that happened to land where they landed. Scattering them irregularly keeps the grid true to what it's reporting: outcomes with no relationship to each other.

How is this different from a pencil case emptied at the end of term?

The pencil case still holds most of what a term produced — traded, swapped, foreign objects mixed in, but present. This grid is closer to total loss: almost nothing that left ever returns, traded or otherwise.

A pencil case is an economy with things moving between children. Hair elastics don't circulate that way — they don't get traded for something better, they just stop existing as far as the household is concerned. There's no equivalent of the pen-and-lid mismatch here, only an absence.

Do any of the twenty-seven end up in the lost property box?

Rarely — that box collects things worth handing in: coats, jumpers, water bottles, objects with enough size and value to get noticed and kept.

A hair elastic is too small, too cheap and too anonymous to be picked up, named and put anywhere. It doesn't get lost in the sense of ending up somewhere findable; it gets lost in the sense of ceasing to be trackable at all, which is a harder kind of gone than anything that box holds.

Does the same kind of arithmetic apply to something that wears out rather than disappears?

Yes, in structure if not in cause — a shoe worn through in eleven weeks turns an invisible daily rate into one legible number, the same job this grid is doing for a different object and a much higher ratio.

Growth and loss are opposite mechanisms measured the same way: neither is visible day to day, and both become obvious the moment somebody counts across a whole term instead of a single afternoon.

Does it print well?

Yes — a flat repeat of identical outline shapes, with three solid fills, holds up cleanly at any size.

Keep every shape in the grid the same size and line weight so the difference is purely fill versus outline, not scale or detail. One ink for the outlines and one flat colour for the three filled shapes is enough; dusty pink or a warm oatmeal ground lets both read clearly without the grid turning muddy at wash weight.

How do I get one made?

Describe the object at JustOG — how many went out, and roughly how many actually came back. Pick a direction, drag the crop frame, see it composited on the real garment, and it's made to order and shipped.

Designs other people have published are in the shop.

A new packet goes in the bag on Monday. Nobody says out loud how many packets that makes.