Today I had my first one-to-one/appraisal at work. Apparently I'm doing pretty damn well, especially for someone who had no management experience before starting this job. I did learn one thing from my interview thing today though - my area manager is a complete cockhead.

See, the area manager I have now isn't the area manager who interviewed me. The dude that interviewed me and decided I was the right man for the job pissed off to be area manager of Manchester. As such he was replaced and now I have to deal with somebody I really don't get on with. It basically all stems from the fact that I didn't actually meet him until a while into the job. While I was off training in Wrexham, everyone else from my store was getting all buddy-buddy with him.

What's genuinely annoyed me is that Mark, the guy i mentioned before who's clearly trying to get my job - managed to succeed in kissing his ass early on. This prompted the area manager to start throwing his weight around with questions like "Why isn't Mark the assistant manager? I think Mark would make a much better manager than this guy I've never even met Is was these comments that started Mark on his ego-fuelled crusade to management, annoying and offending other staff members in the process.

This meant that by the time he met me, the guy who's quiet and reserved around people when first meeting them; he'd already formed his first impression. The reason Mark isn't the assistant manager is because he never applied. Apparently the website link to the application was broken when he tried it, and instead of phoning up Gamestation's head office or emailing them - he decided to just apply for sales assistant instead. I wouldn't say that shows much fucking initiative.

The truth is that Mark is completely without tact or any sort of compassion. He has unrealistically high expectations of the other staff and when theyre not met, instead of giving feedback or trying to motivate them to work harder - he whines in a really passive aggressive way about how he's the only one who does any work. It's all well and good for Scott to see great things in Mark, but that's because he only ever sees him being a kiss-ass. I'm sure if people started approaching Scott and complaining about Mark like they do to me then it'd be a different story. Either way I've been getting stressed out because the whole thing is pissing me off so much. No matter what I do I'll "never be as good as Mark" purely because i refuse to brownose. With any luck they'll ship him out to one of the other stores nearby and I can go back to not feeling so damn threatened.