That would be monster entertaining. Shame @ChaosBoss doesn’t work IRL. 
Like I said, unless you are uncommon and rare, I mean mermaid rare you can be replaced. If you created these files/documents, they can be recreated.
Don’t assume you are that great. I bet you’re really nice and have good skills. Lots of workers do.
Instead of helping a workplace exist after you’re gone, start packing your stuff.
How much paper goes in landfills and files get tossed, including saved documents, when an employee leaves a company.
Your work friends will get a work around or your replacement will.
More importantly, if @MagicEyes has those files on her personal computer, and they aren’t directly accessible by her employer, and she can’t document when and by whom she was authorized to take possession of those files, then she’s not only looking at being fired, but also at the company pressing theft charges against her.
I can’t believe that in a company of 1,000 employees, there is only a single person who has possession of a single copy of important files, and who is allowed to keep them on a personal laptop. What if Magic Eyes were hit by a bus? What if her laptop is stolen?
If employees are not issued laptops and are expected to use their own, and the files they have on them are ones they are authorized to see as a part of their work, I don’t think any charges of theft would hold. Yes, that’s stupid - but so is not doing performance reviews and hiring consultants to sanitize favoritism in hiring.
That’s what they told the person at CrowdStrike who was supposed to test the new release. 
Remember how I mentioned the guy who was fired who had the job of renewing the certificate for the airline web site? Hardly vital, right? Except that his replacement didn’t know about it, and the airline lost tens of millions of dollars of revenue.
I’ve seen many top managers think that all employees are just cogs. It sometimes goes very badly for them and the company. Maybe most workers are, but they never know the one with vital job skills.
I am starting to wonder if the tasks that “only MagicEyes can do” are really tasks everyone can do but are so mundane that everyone just lets Magic Eyes do them for them. I mean, I could clean the restrooms at work, but I would rather just let the janitor do it.
That’s a bit harsh, but really, does it make sense that all these other teams have no idea what MagicEyes does and need to rely on a critical part of their workflow being performed by someone outside of their department and control? Nah, I think they know how to do it, but would rather have MagicEyes do it for them. Perhaps Chaotic boss sees this and says “nope, not our responsibility”.
MagicEyes, you may want to reconsider how valuable your performance of tasks “no one else can do” really is.
Recreating documents takes time (which equals money), skills and knowledge, and other resources like photos (which can’t be recreated).
I don’t want to be too specific, but I do have skills that nobody else at my job does. Of course I could be replaced, but since my boss doesn’t really know what I do (and doesn’t care), I don’t think she’ll replace me with someone who can do the more advanced things that I do. In the past I have pushed back against requests for me to do things that other people can do, because it takes time away from the work no one else can do.
The files are on a work laptop. Of course I will leave the files, but the people who need them won’t have access to them.
As much as you hate to understand it: That’s completely irrelevant.
There’s a new boss managing you and you need to follow orders.
Make that side-project known to your boss. YOU need to take the higher ground and be transparent and informative. Make sure she EXPLICITLY either approves or cancels it IN WRITING without any ‘if you don’t voice an opinion I’ll assume that’s an implicit approval’ bull$#!+ to hide behind.
The point of this advice (from me, and from several other responders here) is that IF your new boss is as damaging to the company as you suggest, the best course of action is to make it so her own directives lead to the exposure of that fact to her managers as soon as possible. And EVERY excuse we see you repeating is hindering that revelation to the people who need to know – not by hearing it, not by reading it, not by asking about it, but FIRST-hand encountering a company-debilitating problem and finding out “Oh. This shitstorm is due to Chaotic Boss’ orders? Get her gone so she can’t cause more damage, then figure out how to clean this up.”
Stop kidding yourself. Well, to be less harsh, if you’re not kidding yourself, you’re not up-to-speed on IT practices since at least the end of the Enron scandal:
In any company of more than a couple dozen people, particularly if there’s a distinction between personal and company technology and especially if there are people whose full-time job is to manage the company’s technology, it has been standard practice to acquire and maintain back-up copies of the company’s data and files. If they ever existed on your work computer, whether compiled into a coherent format or not, the company has already had copies of your important files# since at least the morning after you created them.
–G!
#After the Enron scandal, the US government mandated that any company (and its subsidiaries) with publicly traded stocks had to do that. It’s considered one of the ‘Sarbanes-Oxley’ [sp?] Best Practices for IT and Finance departments to follow and most of the companies doing business as more than mom-and-pop shops follow those Best Practices – not because the government mandates it (because, after all, that mandate was voided roughly five to eight years ago) but because it’s really an extremely prudent practice. [There are, of course, corporate bigwigs whose ethics are disgustingly foul and they’ve been known to actively disregard those best practices for, y’know, their own special reasons. But I digress and shouldn’t hijack this any further.]
And, yeah…“Ripping the bandage off” was a much clearer analogy.
Your IT department can give people access to them. You do have an IT department, don’t you? So, don’t worry about it. I bet they automatically backup your work computer also.
Not your problem when you’re gone.
Forget it.
Apparently the OP wants to be Milton obsessing over his red stapler.
Why haven’t you asked for it yet?
Your description or theirs?
So why are they not already on a flash drive ready to distribute as you walk out the door. Tell IT you need backups of those docs.
Why? Did you take on your own professional development? Do the other people not care about acquiring those skills? Does the company not train them on what they need to do?
Company training people? That’s so 20th century. If you train someone they might leave for another job with that knowledge. We can’t have that now! You hire people with the knowledge, either from school or from companies silly enough to teach them it. Or you pay more for experience.
I used to be in the building next to the training center. It got wiped out and replaced by a customer visitor center. I guest taught there a few times. Now you learn the stuff on the street, as it were.
Are you still there? Not long to go!
But i think you are on shaky ground.
This is typical of boss employee relations. She’s not crazy to want to know what’s on your plate, and to manage what’s on your plate. That was a reasonable assumption on her part, and what’s weird is that she had to explicitly tell you that.
I was an experienced actuary with a specialized skill set and worked very independently, but when someone other than my boss asked me to do something, i dropped my boss a note. And if my boss expressed concern, i carefully explained how much time it would take me and how valuable it would be. And if the time risked my boss’s priorities, well, i wrote to the person who requested my help and said, “sorry, too busy, but if you really need this you can discuss it with my boss.”
Now, she should have had a discussion with your when she first took the role, to learn what you do and why. She didn’t, and she’s a bad manager. But you already knew that. This particular detail, that she wants to know and approve of what her employees are doing, is not part of being a bad manager.
That’s a huge nuisance, but i feel you brought it on yourself by being difficult.
Yes. Because she’s the boss. That’s just how it works.
Good luck, and let us know how it all works out.
This is only typical of psycho boss employee relationships. Unless an employee is severely underperforming the typical boss checks in once a week, makes sure that the goals and priorities of the work are known, and then lets the employee decide how to meet these goals. It appears that this boss not only doesn’t want the other group’s work done or her work done, since she never seems to approve anything.
Managing tasks down to the level of detail seen here is micromanagement and just about every management class I’ve taken says it is a bad thing. Now, new bosses do it often because they are better at tasks than their reports - why they get promoted - but that isn’t even the case here.
When I assigned someone a new job, I’d work with them to figure out what currently on their plate could be delayed to do it. If I knew that something was low priority, I’d tell them, otherwise I’d let them pick but make sure they knew that I didn’t expect them just to do more.
I’ve managed people who managed subgroup, and if one of them ever tried to pull the crap the psycho boss is pulling they’d be in trouble. Luckily, I’ve never had that problem.
My guess is that the psycho boss either has it in for MagicEyes or is incredibly insecure, knowing that she got the job through influence and isn’t really up to it.
I only chatted with my boss once a week, but he generally knew i was working on these three projects. And yeah, the details were up to me. But if i got a call from my buddy in another department wondering if i could help on their project, I’d have mentioned that to my boss. And he doesn’t seem to have done that. It’s largely on her for not having learned that part of his role was being a resource for xyz projects. But… It’s weird that she didn’t know that, and word that he resents telling her, imho.
The odd part here is that MagicEyes does not seem to be loaded with approved work. I got a bunch of people from another Vice Presidential division to help me, all approved. I agree with what you said above about the reasonable thing to do would have been to meet with the management of the other group to understand the situation.
Someone in my critique group wrote fiction about a work environment where the boss insisted on being copied on all emails, just like this case. It was a murder mystery. The boss got knocked off. The cops in the story wondered why no one was heartbroken by this.
The situation, not the murder, seemed to come from real life.
Lol.
I used to work with a woman who asked us to cc her when we had questions for her staff. (The kind of question that might make them do research, not the kind of question they could answer if the cuff.) As best as i could tell, she was well-liked. But maybe her staff just wanted to look good to her.
I’m still hanging in there. It’s not going well, but I don’t have an exit plan yet.
I was going to respond to some questions, but that’s getting too long, so I’m going to back up and try to get the bigger picture. She wasn’t interested in what I was doing for the first six months, so I kept on doing what I’ve been doing for years. This is all things that are in my job description or were requested by other departments. She has not been willing to tell me how she wants to be involved in the projects I work on for other departments. I’ve finally gotten some clarity on that, but only because we’ve started having meetings with HR and it wouldn’t look good for her to refuse to answer those questions.
Instead of asking me what I’m working on, she makes incorrect assumptions based on the time logs I give her every day. It would be so much easier if she would use her big-girl words and ask me. 
It is absolutely reasonable for her to know what I’m working on, but she’s doing it in the worst possible way.
Yes to this! I’ve never seen micromanagement this extreme. IMHO it’s not good for the director to be involved in every little thing. What makes this worse is, she thinks she knows everything and is an expert in everything. She definitely doesn’t know much about my job or how it’s done, but to hear her talk, you’d think she has years of experience with it. She wants to closely manage how much time I spend on each task, but she doesn’t have a realistic idea how long things should take.
Based on some other things that have happened, I think there is an organized effort by senior management and HR to squash any objections to her reign of terror. I’m the first to go, but I’m sure she’ll move on to other people after I’m gone. She’s done this before, and she’ll do it again.
How much longer do you have to go? From what you post, it doesn’t seem significantly worse, so just keep your head down and do whatever it takes to stick it out.
And then they’ll say how ungrateful people are for leaving. I had one horrible boss (not as bad as yours) and when I left they were shocked, shocked. And offered me the transfer I had asked for to try to get me to stay. No chance.
Glad HR is involved and hang in there until you can leave on your own two feet.