Perspective: 'shortage' is a verb

This is a perspective piece: our opinion, plainly labeled.

The word 'shortage' sounds like weather — something that happens to you. Stand in enough equipment storerooms and a different picture forms. The ultrasound exists; it's three rooms away, broken for want of a manual. The parts exist; they're in a container that cleared customs to the wrong consignee. The expertise exists; it retired to Florida last spring and nobody kept the phone number.

Much of what we call shortage is really separation — between devices and documentation, between problems and the people who've solved them, between supply and the information about who needs it. Separation is not weather. Separation is logistics, and logistics can be fixed by ordinary people who decide to connect things.

That's not a claim that real scarcity doesn't exist. Budgets are brutal and some things are genuinely absent. But it is a claim about where to aim first: before campaigning for new supply, close the separations. The cheapest equipment you'll ever 'acquire' is the equipment you already own, reconnected to what it needs to run.

Shortage is a verb. Somebody, somewhere, is doing it — usually unknowingly, usually fixably. Networks exist to do the opposite.