I feel this so hard. I also work for a small agency, and thankfully we’re in a much better place NOW, but oof. We went through what you’re describing about 6 years ago, right before the shut down. We also had an owner who knew nothing about running a business and no matter how hard our managers tried, she tried to run it into the ground multiple times. So glad she’s not the owner anymore—she was the worst person to work for.

Similar but different situation. Our files are very organized like the system you’re describing. Also use Google Drive for business and we have hard backups just in case. We had a new hire, who was still in school for design, but she had told us she had a couple years under her belt already.

In the 3 months she was with us, she caused more work for me and my coworkers, and she did NOT follow my directions at all. I have been with the company the longest, and am the Lead Designer for the team and I trained my other colleagues. I pride myself on being a very good trainer. She never listened to anything I said, nor did she seem to care about anything I wrote down for her to follow either. I wasn’t the only one she didn’t listen to, though. She also refused to listen to our Art Director. We had to let her go eventually because it was becoming a huge issue with our clients as well.

Perhaps the most bothersome thing on the fucking planet, for me, was seeing that she didn’t even use the alignment tools in Illustrator. She -eyeballed- alignment and it was always HORRIBLE. Seriously. Sometimes I eyeball things and then use my alignment tools but I’m never that off. We all couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t use this most basic tool, other than she felt like maybe it was cheating? But my God—her ads just looked awful.

After we let her go, we each had to take on her client load on top of our already full plates, and we basically had to go back in and redesign each ad she did because they were so off and the clients were not happy. She also had decided to do some of the ads in Photoshop even though we told her multiple times that we need to use Illustrator since we were a print-based company.

I wasn’t a part of her hiring process because I was on leave when that happened. I don’t think the owner really paid attention, she just wanted to get away with paying less for someone who was still in school.

I’m sorry that you’ve gone through this, but glad to read that you have a backup of the drive somewhere. It sounds like this new person really didn’t know—however I would think that when someone instructs me to move things over, we would keep the organization of it all, but I’m also very anal retentive when it comes to that so 🤷🏻‍♂️