Back to the Apprentice. What is Kendra’s problem with Craig exactly? Later in the episode he was being rather condescending to her when she would not give up on trying to jam horizontal file folders into the vertical organizer, but most of the time it just seems like he asks some ordinary question and she starts going off on how he’s “pushing her buttons”. I have been predicting a Kendra win for awhile now, but she’s begun to annoy me so much that I’m edging closer to choosing Tana instead. I still find myself liking Craig, I think he’s pretty bright and gets good ideas but just works in a different way from the other contestants and doesn’t articulate his thought processes well. Like when Magna went to Staples, Kendra and Tana started interviewing customers – or at least looking into one customer’s shopping cart – while Craig wandered around staring at products and opening desk drawers. This irritated Kendra, who “had no clue – no clue” what Craig was doing and wanted him to be next to them because obviously asking a customer what he’s buying and what he’d like to buy is a job that requires three people. My thought is that maybe Craig was envisioning the office their product would be ending up in, checking out desks and drawers to see what sort of space to house an organizer they would be working with, etc. Then when he goes with her “idea” – though I’m not sure that looking into someone’s shopping cart and saying the name of the existing product they see there can quite be called an idea – she gripes that “Craig took my idea because that’s just who Craig is.” You mean the project manager? The alternative to him taking her idea would have been him rejecting her idea, right? Not to mention the fact that Craig actually turned it into something other than a pre-existing product. And by they way, when they explained their idea to George why was he all dubious, saying “It sounds like a great idea, but that’s going to be a lot of work, do you really think you can get that done in time?” Am I just not appreciating the difficulties presented by turning four stackables on their sides and gluing them together to form a square or does George just enjoy being dubious? Over on the all-booksmart Net Worth side, Alex demonstrated why Trump later told him, “You’re not a star, you’re not a star” with his decision not to meet in person with the people who were going to be judging them but instead calling them. Not just calling them, either, calling them on a cell phone. And just in case the low quality and instability of a cell connection was not enough of a fuck you to the people he was calling, he also put them on speakerphone. What is it with business jerks and speakerphones anyway? If you’ve got a conference table full of people listening to a call it can make sense, but usually it is just a way of telling people, “I am very busy and you are far too insignificant for me to bother picking up a handset so we can have a clear conversation without a bunch of echo and the beginning of all my sentences cutting out.” Bren’s attempt to conduct his market research was also speakerphone-based, even though he was all alone and doing nothing other than talking on the phone. Here’s the IAAFOTS etiquette lesson for today, readers: if you are in a situation where a landline is available, using a cell phone instead is rude, and putting someone on speakerphone is always rude unless you only have one phone and a group people who need to hear the call. Another indication that Alex is not a star came when he unveiled his groundbreaking invention to eliminate desk clutter: the desk. A desk where instead of drawers that pull out you have drawers that you need to remove the top of the desk to access, but basically a desk. It really surprised me that Alex’s solution was so uncreative, since he’s clearly used to thinking outside the box (sorry, had to take that one myself). As soon as they saw the completed design and started going off on what a Magna-crushing home run it was, any fears I may have had that my prediction of another Net Worth loss might not come true disappeared. I’ll be back with the conclusion after taking a moment to earn my keep here.