I work in a small group. There's a boss at the top who's very disorganized and doesn't like to manage. So he has this other employee help him; she's been in the group forever and has a lot of authority. However, although she's nosy and a control freak, she's also badly organized and is even worse at managing than him.

Well frankly she's just driving me crazy. I've worked with her for about ten years but a lot of that time she was uninvolved in my projects. Now we overlap more. For the record, we're good friends on the surface; I always politely listen to her and show her my respect and she thinks we're friends. We're kind of friends. But I internalize a lot of her crap and just don't know how to be less affected.

Today, I made the mistake of telling her a little about this new guy I've been working with and how it's great that the boss likes him but that I'm worried the boss is dumping way too many details on this guy too early on for the project. I commented that once things are more underway, I'll be working with this guy 1-1 and not including the boss in all our calls. She immediately freaked out and was like, "No you can't do that, you have to include the boss in all the calls."

Now, the situation is complicated and I don't want this post to get too long, so I'll just say--I hired this guy. He has nothing to do with the group. Including my boss on those calls is a courtesy. I call my boss my boss, but actually--he's not my boss anymore. I have my own group with my own money and my group *collaborates* with my boss's group. So it's 100% up to me, as the one paying the new guy, whether or not I want to include my *former* boss in those calls.
So this coworker, since she's not on the calls, hates the idea of my former boss not being on all of them because then he can't tell her what's going on.

I don't think fast on my feet and rarely confront people on the spot. So I couldn't bring myself to disagree. But I feel so frustrated, oppressed, furious, etc. with my coworker who just has to try to control everything and know everything. I know this sounds like a minor incident, but this isn't the first time she tries to "know everything" and tamper in things that aren't her business. I try to tell her as little as possible, but she always wants to "gossip" in the break room, gush about whatever's on her mind and try to extract any information she can so she can use it to maintain control and ease her anxiety that there's nothing she doesn't know.

Lately I'm just surprised by how much I find myself hating this person and how depressed, upset, disturbed, hopeless, etc. I feel after our interactions. I'm trying to avoid her, but I can't avoid her all the time. The other people in my *new* group literally refuse to speak to her/return her emails because they can't stand how she behaves. This actually puts even more burden on me to communicate with her because we still work together and I'm the only person willing to update her.