So, this week’s challenge was for the teams to set up handyman jobs and go around doing ‘odd jobs’, which seems like an even worse idea than the children’s book challenge, because it’s possible to actually seriously screw up someone’s home or business if, say, you’re washing their windows and you accidentally set fire to the building.
Or if you try to put up a shelf and instead put a massive hole in the wall, we’ll talk about that in a moment.
Lord Sugar picked the team leaders for this one, putting construction executive Elle in charge of Versatile and builder Brett in charge of Connexus. Obvious choices there, the teams would probably have chosen the same way.
Things kind of went downhill immediately, though, when it came to putting together the fliers. Connexus decided their slogan would be ‘connexing people together’, which sounds like the slogan of a telephone company owned by Genghis Khan; while Versatile spent so long discussing whether it should be ‘Minor DIY and window cleaning’ or ‘Window cleaning and minor DIY’ that they missed the deadline for fliers entirely.
(Mergim decided to make the best of a bad situation by scribbling notes on pieces of paper and putting them up in shop windows, and was roundly mocked by the team for this, despite the fact that his logic was completely solid: They didn’t have any fliers because their team were fucking about, and it was better to have horrible sub-par advertisements than nothing at all.
Mergim would also be mocked for completely different things later, but we’ll get to that soon.)
Connexus, in an odd turn, didn’t manage to make any money on the first day of the task, because instead of doing handyman jobs, they were doing market research, which basically consisted of wandering around asking if anyone knew anyone who needed work done, to which the answer was always ‘No.’
Versatile did manage to get jobs on the first day, but it would probably have been better if they hadn’t. Apart from sub-team pricer April’s ridiculously low price point (ten quid a job), the sub-team also had Mergim, who, it turns out, is an actual walking disaster area with the most terrific case of Dunning-Kruger Syndrome I’d seen in a while.
The man insisted that he was a brilliant handyman. He insisted on that so hard, even as he was putting up a shelf and having to be gently told by Karren, in the manner of a beleaguered primary school teacher, that you don’t screw in a nail. Instead of putting up a shelf, he instead made a gigantic hole in the wall of a poor woman’s shop.
“That’s pretty bad,” you might be saying, but guess what? Mergim also doesn’t know how to paint. When asked to paint a shop front, he instead painted the shop’s sign. He painted over the sign. That shop has no sign now.
Connexus, meanwhile, did surprisingly well, scoring a lucrative job cleaning a football stadium - which they then failed to complete, something team leader Brett said was due to how professional he was, because apparently Brett takes a homeopathist’s approach to professionalism. Surprisingly, they still got paid almost the full amount.
In the board room, it was revealed that Connexus had brought in nearly twice as much money as Versatile, with £1050 to their £530. Since Elle, the team leader, has yet to ever be on a winning team despite having been in the process for six weeks, she was fired on the spot - leaving Mergim to bring back two people with him.
He brought back April, because she was responsible for the pricing, and David, who had just kind of blended into the background. April was fired shortly thereafter for the catastrophe that was the ten pounds a job pricing, followed shortly by Mergim, because oh my god you can’t put up a shelf or paint.
Which is good news for the rest of the candidates, since a triple firing means one less double firing means some lucky person is going to get to stay in the process for longer than they otherwise would have.
Also, Mergim dreams of being a millionaire. I just thought I’d throw that one out there.
He doesn’t know how to paint.
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