You should consider knock-on effects of this brilliant idea. Now there would be copies of spreadsheets younger than a month that get replicated 47 billion times, exponentially compounding the problem you're trying to solve.
This sounds like how we pass so many stupid laws. Nobody thinks about 2nd order effects.
Which is very annoying and people will complain. People complaining can be then directed towards a better solution. As a bonus, mistakes will also rise, leading to further complaints, especially ones that reach higher. All this making the dogshit practice, and the idiots committing them, infinitely more visible and thus fixable.
The sheer volume of data that needs tending to may even grind certain departments to a halt! What a great opportunity! It'd appear I'm positively stellar at this!
No worries, was a bit of a gamble of a joke from me (sarcasm frequently doesn't translate in text, or can be inopportune), so I tried taking it accordingly.
For clarity, while I did have some rather perverse fun toying with the idea, I do not actually think it should be implemented, or at least certainly not in one fell swoop and as-is. Mostly for the aforelisted reasons. This is what I actually intended to convey.
Though for better or for worse, that doesn't mean I think the notion is completely meritless either, so I might still be deserving of at least some of your snark. But a lot of it was in jest from my side indeed.
This whole keeping an inventory, disabling items, and later taking them out completely is a chore I already do in other contexts. While it does work, it is anxiety inducing, doesn't really scale well, and it's quite miserable to go through with. It's the cost of keeping things organized as far as I'm concerned, with no real way around it in the general case. The best one can do is try and mitigate it, by monitoring for patterns and building out systems, to automate and streamline the tedium away.
I do sincerely not know of other ways to keep things in check though, in lieu of which you do get the makeshift shadow ops with all of its pitfalls. It's kind of just life.
