Is it just me or are the tasks starting to seem a bit daft on The Apprentice? Part of me is longing for something, I don't know, a bit more properly business-like. “Oh, look, they have five minutes to prepare for something they're all woefully underqualified to do. That's a good test of whether they'd be able to head up a major division of a global business company.”
Obviously, this is not a new criticism. But I'm looking for a little variety, I think. Something new, rather than the same old, same old. How about you?
PS Any Mac users think the teams would have done better if they'd had MacBooks and iPhoto instead of HP Windows rejects?
PPS Why do all the news outlets insist of putting the names of the fired apprentices on their front pages the very next day? Either you watched it, in which case you know who was fired, or you didn't – in which case you either don't care or you're now very hacked off. Like me.
April 18, 2008 | Reply
"Why do all the news outlets insist of putting the names of the fired apprentices on their front pages the very next day?"
Worse than that is the BBC itself. After watching something on Three, we had the stupid 60-second news update running in the background, which mentioned the person who'd been fired about an hour previously. Thanks, BBC! It's not like I'd recorded the show to watch the following day or anything!
April 18, 2008 | Reply
"Is it just me or are the tasks starting to seem a bit daft on The Apprentice?" Absolutely! I said in one of my reviews that the candidates must be starting to wonder what sort of job they're applying for!
April 18, 2008 | Reply
They're being tested on their ability to project manage, i.e. making sure all the tasks are identified, allocated and performed, making sure everyone in the team contributes to the best of their ability - both in ideas and in execution, making sure everyone stays focused on the task at hand rather than going off at tangents, etc.
What the actual project is really shouldn't matter.
April 21, 2008 | Reply
Kind of. But that would only be true if it were only the project leaders whose heads were on the chopping board. But in task one, it was Nick, the guy who couldn't price fish correctly, who got the shove; and in task two it was the woman who set up the laundry processing system, told everyone how it worked then left when the project manager told her to who got the shove (and it's not like they couldn't have phoned her to ask if they had problems). So clearly, it's not just project management that's the problem.
Besides, my complaint was that I was getting bored of non-business tasks with little relevance to the eventual job – not that I'd never enjoyed them or that they'd never been interesting.
April 21, 2008 | Reply
What always beats me about the Apprentice is that they never EVER seem to do the obvious thing and go for some basic market research. If you're selling fish on a fish stall, before you even set up, someone should go down the road and find out what the competition is selling it for. I thought Nick was appalling, but the way he was treated was worse, and the project manager was crap. I also thought the girl who got fired after the laundry debacle was fired unfairly as the project manager that time was also crap. And it drives me INSANE that no one ever ever admits responsibility for anything ever. Doesn't Sir Alan want people who are prepared not just to shaft people, but own up to their errors. I would have thought the arrogance of most of the competitors should be a prime reason for NOT employing them.
Having said that, I did apply to be in the second series (what can I say, I am very very bored housewife), and I love the schadenfreude of it!