Act I: The Original Sin
It all began with a template. A perfectly innocent file, copied from a colleague who left three years ago. It was called “Insider List Template Final.xlsx” and, like most tragedies, it was doomed from the start.
No one knew who created it. No one knew why it had a hidden sheet labelled “DO NOT TOUCH”. But it looked official, and crucially, it required no thinking. So naturally, it became gospel.
Act II: The Duplication Era
One day, someone opened it, updated a few names, and saved it as “Insider List Q1 2023 FINAL”. Then they emailed it to themselves, made a few edits, and saved that as “Insider List Q1 2023 FINAL v2”. Then came “FINAL FINAL”, followed by “(USE THIS ONE)”, and then, inexplicably, “Copy of Insider List Q1 2023 USE THIS ONE v2 (2)”.
By spring, there were six versions on the drive, three in email chains, and one printed out and pinned to a desk divider. None of them matched. All of them claimed to be definitive.
Act III: The Reckoning
Enter the regulator. Mild request, nothing dramatic. Just a simple ask for the insider list from a specific week, sometime last March. You know, the week Steve maybe saw the pre-close figures. Or maybe it was Rachel. Hard to say.
Cue panic. Documents opened. Tabs compared. Rows misaligned. People claiming “that’s not the version I used.” The IT team logs show edits at midnight from an IP address in Malaga. No one knows why.
Eventually, the team sends a version that references a person who left in 2021, a deal that never happened, and includes someone named “Temp (??)” in the notes column. Confidence is not high.
Act IV: Acceptance, or Something Like It
There is a moment, after the emails have been sent, and the calls have been made, when you realise this is your life now. Version control is not a feature of your compliance process. It is the compliance process. The list is both everything and nothing. Schrödinger’s list.
And somewhere, whispering from the shadows, is InsiderList. Versionless. Audit-proof. Boringly accurate. No printable chaos, no ghost entries, no existential spreadsheet spiral.
But for now, you sit with your tabs. Your folders. Your regrets.
You tried. You copied the file. You added the v2. That counts for something, doesn’t it?
(Reader: it does not.)
