The Apprentice LA - Episode 4

I’m starting to notice a theme here. 3 days pass, 3 days worth of stuff happens, they show 7 minutes of it. Think about it. An episode is an hour. Subtract commercials, you have about 40 minutes. Boardroom is about 12 minutes. Task announcement and reward combine for about 6 minutes. Of the remaining 22 minutes, about 15 go to the losing team, since a good chunk of time is allotted to the losing team arguing post-task about what happened and conniving against each other. That leaves about 7 minutes for the winning team’s task, and a few more minutes for their reward. So let’s say they show 10 minutes total when you win. Which means they don’t show 71 hours and 50 minutes.

And that’s why I’m here—to tell the full story. Does the fact that many of you don’t want to hear the whole story play into this? Of course not.

So, with that said, let’s back up to the final night of task 3 (day 9 overall).

Trump calls, we jump around like idiots, and Arrow is a team once more. As you saw in their clever opening montage, we were having a little time of it out there in the campsite. We were a happy team. We had just been divided against each other for three days, and three of us had spent the last 24 hours in fear of being sent home. Suddenly, there would be no boardroom, and the six of us were damn happy to be there and to be a team again. I started telling Steph, Aaron and James about our disaster of a tour, and they were dying laughing. We brought out the alcohol, and sat around the fire, and it was one of the best team nights we had. That’s one thing about living outside—you bond. After nine days and three tasks, you know each other really well (anyone who’s ever done a camping/hiking trip with strangers for nine days knows what I’m talking about).

At that moment, my thoughts on my team members were:

Aaron: big fan of Aaron. Genuinely nice guy, and if you look at the rest of the team—a contractor from the Bronx who didn’t go college (Frank), an ultra-driven real estate hotshot who had basically never met a Jew before coming on the show (Nicole), a first generation immigrant, also ultra-driven, who was determined to be an internet billionaire (James), and a high-powered, 34-year-old lawyer who rides motorcycles (Steph)—Aaron (an MBA student from Virginia, a sports fan, trying to figure out what he wanted to do after getting his degree) was the person I could best relate to. This was not my typical group of friends, and Aaron was just a nice, smart, laid-back dude. He was also a quiet guy, which was appreciated on a team with three of the loudest people on the planet (James, Frank, and Nicole).

Frank: Frank was fun. He was very big on being the center of attention at all times, which would have been more annoying if he wasn’t pretty funny. And I could never decide if he was trying to be funny or if his whole way just happen really was just funny—like, just being himself, which coincidentally happens to be funny. I think probably the latter. But he and I—though the episodes have not shown it—had become friends. Did I think he’d be a good leader, or a creative thinker, ever? No. But he could get a job done if you asked him to, and a person like that is valuable on a team full of thinkers.

Nicole: Did we have anything in common? No. Had I ever been friends with someone like her before? No. Was I infatuated? Yes.

James: James had a lot of positive energy, but I remember thinking that he was probably unabashedly ripping his teammates in the interviews.

Stephanie: Stephanie was tough to figure out. She was definitely intelligent, and she and I had a pleasant relationship, but while the rest of the team really bonded and opened up to each other, Steph was more reserved, and seemed to hold back. I definitely felt like I knew her much less well than the others. The rest of the team was a collective open book, while it was hard to know what Steph was really thinking.

As for the dynamics within the team—after the previous task, it was clear that Steph, James, and Aaron had bonded with each other, and Nicole, Frank and I had as well, so there was a slight divide there, but nothing of real concern. Plus, Aaron was the person who best had the trust of each person individually. He was individually friends with everyone, other than maybe Nicole,. And we all appreciated his type-B personality in a team full of type-A+++’s. Further, because he was quiet, and laid-back, and so nice, none of us was very threatened by him in the long run. Put all that together, and he’s the perfect person to be leading this team.

So anyway, while we were drinking and being silly, they showed the other team having a stiff meeting to stress the contrast between the two teams. This is not clever editing work—the teams were actually that different. We were the fun, goofy team who loses and they were the serious, stiff team who wins. We drank, they didn’t. We stayed up late even though there’s a task the next day, they went to bed early. We made fun of each other, they were polite and formal. Etc.

There are probably a number of reasons it shaped out this way—(one of which was the campsite—sitting outside around a fire for 9 days will make you forget you’re on a business reality show)—but it was a stark contrast.

So we get the phone call—someone from Kinetic has to come over to Arrow. We had all watched previous seasons of the show—we figured this would happen. And we had talked about it. Our consensus had been that our first choice was Angela (the Olympian—and an extremely cool girl), and our second was Surya (he just seemed like a solid guy—we all liked him). We didn’t know anyone on the other team well due to the separation, but we knew them better than the episodes have shown. There were conversations through the hedge here and there.

When he called, we didn’t know if he was going to ask Kinetic who they want keep least or who we want the most (they’ve done it both ways in the past). He did some combination of both as it turned out. As I’ve since learned, Marisa and Aimee both wanted to switch because they weren’t feeling liked by their team, and Surya wanted to because he thought of it as an opportunity to step up when Trump asked someone to volunteer (and he’s no fool—switch to the losing team and they win, and you look like the winner of the world). So hearing our options, we took Surya.

The ensuing scene was pretty accurate. We were incredibly warm and welcoming and wanted him to have a beer with us, tell us about himself, say he’s happy to be there, and we’d all head off to bed, one happy team. But he was reluctant to hug anyone and certainly not taking a beer. He launched into his list of things he thought were important. I see what he was trying to do, but he just did it the wrong way. When you switch teams, whatever you do, you don’t patronize. You don’t immediately try to change things, and you don’t start laying down the new ground rules. As far as teams go, we were an easy one to come over to—we were very excited about having him and no one was even thinking about judging him. And he just botched it. Plus, we were all drunk, and he was sober times 100. Just an awkward scene. All that said, I liked Surya, and was happy to have him there (and the poor guy also had some good moments, none of which made the episode. You can see some of them in this week’s webisode: http://apprentice.tv.yahoo.com/trump/06/episodes/week4_videos.html#1643404). Plus, this facilitated a situation in which I’d have the pleasure of hearing Frank try to correctly pronounce “Surya” dozens of times.

So we wake up the next morning (day 1 of task 4, day 10 overall) and head to the Hollywood overlook to meet Trump. To our surprise, Sean (last season’s winner) is with him, along with a large, extremely bald man, and a little woman. Trump announces the task—after creating and leading a 90 minute bus tour, making a bowl of chicken and selling it seemed just fine to me.

We headed to our restaurant (in a task like this, each team is assigned their own restaurant, and the part of the crew that organizes this does a lot of research to find two restaurants that are comparable in every way and do almost identical business on a normal day, to ensure complete fairness). We met with the two CEO’s and learned about their brand (in general, the rule is: in a task where the executives judge you to determine the winner, this meeting is very important; in a task where you have to sell the most, this meeting is not especially important).

Aaron sent Surya, James, and Frank out to get all the balloons, banners, and other marketing materials. Aaron, Stephanie, Nicole and I stayed around to create the bowl and the price point. Price point is a crucial discussion—but only when it is an important factor in the outcome does an episode stress this issue. At the time, though, coming up with a price point is intense. I was always willing to be active in a price point discussion—looking back, this was dumb. If you come out with a good price point, no one will ever know or care. If you mess it up and lose because of it, you’ll be fired. Not much upside there.

In this case, Nicole and I came up with it. $4.99. The thinking was that people at fast food restaurants are cheap, and if our bowl costs a bit less than their cheapest bowl, it would be less difficult to convert buyers at the point of sale (I’ve been on this show too long—in English, that means that people come in planning to buy what they always buy, and our real challenge is to convince them to pass that up and buy our bowl. Which is not as easy as it sounds). I also had the idea to tell everyone it was normally a $5.99 bowl but since it was its first day, it was a dollar off.

Steph created the bowl, Nicole named it, and we were pleased. After Carey’s bikini bottom debacle, we decided to screw “out of the box,” and create a bowl right in the dead center of the box. The Chicken Tortilla Bowl (yes, Frank pronounces the “L’s” in tortilla. He also kept calling the restaurant “El Polo Loco”—I finally told him to not refer to the restaurant by its name under any circumstance, to anyone). We were very smart to stay in the box here—if people are going to switch their normal lunch, they don’t want to be risky.

So the marketing team gets back, and we hang all the signs up, and make up a “$1 Off New Bowl!” flyer, and plaster it on every car in the area. I headed out with Aaron and hired some high school girls to stand in front of the restaurant the next day handing out the flyer, and we gave one of the girls—yes—a chicken suit.

Yup, crazy old Marisa had a decent idea with that suit. It is the El Pollo Loco mascot, and why the hell not? You have access to it, you might as well pay someone to stand there and advertise your bowl with it. However, since this episode’s story is “Marisa is crazy and annoying with her weird chicken suit idea,” they don’t show the winning team using the same idea. If Aimee or Heidi had been fired instead, they would have shown it. (Fun Fact: In his younger years, then-struggling actor Brad Pitt had a job wearing the chicken suit for El Pollo Loco)

The late afternoon rolls around, and we all head into the restaurant for our five-hour training (the dossier states that only team members who have gone through the full training are allowed to work inside the restaurant. The deleted scenes show that Marisa and Derek came back too late to make the training, which is why they were in suits outside instead of inside wearing the restaurant uniforms).

So we go through training. We’ll be doing almost everything involved in running the restaurant the next day, from cutting up whole dead chickens to packaging meals to working the cash registers. Everything was pretty simple, except for the f’ing registers. The normal orders were fine—no problem. The tricky part is when someone asks for a Number 2, but with two thighs instead of one breast and one thigh, and a chicken sandwich with extra hot sauce but no mayonnaise, and an extra macaroni and cheese to go. Each of these specifics was somewhere inside one of the cash register’s computer menus, so we had to master the entire interface. The guy training us stressed that every second we were fumbling around searching for the right button, we’d be losing sales and the lines would get backed up. Now, Aaron had designated me and James his “best sales guys” and as such I’d be on one of the two front registers. So of course I suddenly was blessed with the hideous image of a line 12 people long, while I, sweating, frantically search for the “kids ice cream” button—everyone is furious at me, and then we lose, and I get fired brutally, and endure a life of “how many Harvard grads does it take to work a fast food cash register?” jokes.

So from 11pm when the training ended until about 3am we were all in the restaurant together, learning the registers, setting up marketing materials, researching local businesses who might want to buy in bulk, etc.

At 3am I went to the van to take a nap (this was the first time I slept during a task). Nicole decided to do the same.

Now—the producers had first caught on to the fact that something was going on with the two of us during episode two, when a producer pulled me out on an OTF and asked, “So, what’s going on with you and Nicole?” I replied, “Nothing. We’re buddies.” He said, “Bullshit—there’s clearly flirting going on, you might as well say it.” I refrained. Episode 3, I got more questions about it, and refrained continually. The producers smelled blood—this was good. They kept asking, and I kept not saying anything. And since there was always a camera around, nothing happened between us.

Then, the night Surya came over, after the whole first impression scene (during which cameras were swarming), it was just me, Nicole, and Surya, talking. Since there wasn’t much happening at this point and it was all contained to one conversation, there was only one camera guy there. Then Surya went to bed, and as he went into the tent, the camera followed him in, to capture the “Surya goes to bed in the tent for the first time” moment. In an extremely rare instance, there was no camera. So naturally, I went in for the kiss. She responded by pulling the sleeping bag she was in up over her head and saying “What are you doing?!”

Nice job, Tim.

The sound guy must have heard something, because the camera guy suddenly came vaulting head first out of the tent and quickly focused the camera on us. The brief window of privacy came and went.

[It’s moments like these that I have a flash of awareness that there are almost 200 hundred people on this list (up from an original 60), and I realize that I’m telling stories like these to all 200 of you. Then I sigh, deeply and self-loathingly, and continue typing.]

So, when on this night I head into the van for a nap, joined by Nicole, a camera is about two inches behind. We get into the van and each lie in one of the rows. I glance up at the window and see a camera there, aimed at my eyeball. What a weird existence I was living.

So I slept there for an hour or two, and woke up around when a couple of the other people came to take our spots. It was that “I’d pay $10,000 to be able to go back to sleep” feeling again. I tried to rouse myself, and headed back to the cash register, to continue learning its complex ways. Aaron asked Nicole to research potential bulk buyers.

It was about 6am. At 9am the restaurant would open to the public and our sales period would begin. The lunch rush, we learned, typically took place between 11:45am and 1:30pm. At 1:30, the restaurant would be turned over to its normal employees, and the task would be over.

So we continued preparing, and plastered more flyers around, and at 9am, the doors opened. And no one came in. We had 1 customer between 9 and 10 (and I sold them a bowl). Around 10am I started joining Nicole calling local businesses. Very few were interested. The dossier made bulk sales extremely difficult, by ruling that every bowl we sold had to be at the same price (so we couldn’t offer a bulk deal), and that every dollar that entered the cash register had to be handed to the cashier by the customer. So we couldn’t offer to deliver the bowls—someone would have to come to the restaurant and buy them.

Shortly after, both Nicole and I found a promising lead. Hers was at an office building, where a manager had agreed to purchase 50 bowls. Mine was at a Nissan dealership 30 minutes away, where a lady there, Melinda, had told us there were over 30 people there who would all probably want one. I started thinking about it, and realized that in a 2-hour lunch rush, neither team would be able to sell over 100 bowls, so either of these—50 or 30—would probably be enough to guarantee us a victory. At 10:15, with an hour and a half until the rush began, I told Aaron I wanted to give these a try. He was nervous, because the task purposely leaves both teams understaffed, so the rush gets busy and stressful, and missing 2 people during the rush would be a big problem. Plus, we only had 7 to Kinetic’s 8 to start off with. Aaron said to go, but that we had to be back by 11:45.

As I mentioned earlier, the team was allowed to split up into at most 2 groups, but each group had to have at least 2 people (this is because if someone goes off solo, they’ll think everything—if they’re with a partner, they’ll say everything, which is obviously much better TV). So Frank joined me.

We headed to the first place, the office building. When we got there, we asked the producers for clearance (this is a hideous part of the show—we’re never allowed to enter any location without official clearance, which allows the cameras to enter as well. Most places do not grant clearance, so half the battle during these tasks is just being able to go where you need to go for errands, meetings, or in this case, bulk sales). The producers sent the clearance team to do their thing, and reported to us 10 minutes later that we had not received clearance. Fuck. So we waited outside the office building, with our token camera and crew behind us, and when the first person walked out, we asked/begged them to go and find the manager Nicole had spoken on the phone with. This was a weird scene. We finally got someone with authority outside and I explained that we had a new bowl “specifically for local businesses,” and that we were selling it at “a special bulk rate of $2 off per bowl.” Apparently, she was intrigued by my lies, and said she’d go in and see who was interested. She told us that she could probably get at least 30 people to buy one.

This was extremely exciting. We waited for about 20 excruciatingly long minutes. Finally someone came outside and we asked them if they knew anything about the bowls or the lady or where the hell the lady was. They didn’t know, but went in to check. A few minutes later the lady came out and said, “Oh, I’m sorry, but my manager said no.” Rage boiled within me.

So we got back in our van—it was about 11:00, and we wouldn’t have time to go to the Nissan dealership. I called them anyway, and spoke with Melinda, and asked her if she could definitely get people interested. She said she thought she could. I called Aaron, and said it was a half hour drive each way and that we’d be a little late but that I thought it was worth the try. He said to go for it, but to make sure we got back as close to noon as possible. This was a pretty huge risk.

So we drove to the dealership. Of course, we couldn’t find it, which was heart attack-inducing, and didn’t get there until after 11:30. When we found it, we ran out of the van, and of course, the producer stops me for an OTF. Always the worst times. The producer is asking me every conceivable question, including gems like, “So, if you guys miss the lunch rush and come back empty-handed, a lot of blame will fall on you, since this was pretty much your personal mission, right?” To which I’d respond, “I’m going to miss the lunch rush because of this OTF.” To which she’d come back with, “I can wait here all night, you just tell me when you’re ready to answer the question.” DAMMIT!!

Finally, the interview finished (probably lasted for 10 disgusting minutes), and we bolted in to the dealership. We asked for Melinda, and found her. We asked her if she had gotten any orders. She hadn’t. We asked her if she wouldn’t mind asking for orders, since she had told us she would. She casually asked the four people in the office with us, and they all declined. We begged. She shrugged. This was crushing. We asked her if there was anything we could do. She replied that a lot of people already had things planned for lunch. I had to viciously restrain myself from assaulting her.

We walked out and into the main room (where you saw us). I told the guy at the desk about the chicken bowl, and asked if he wanted one. “Sure,” he said. I asked the guys next to him. “Sure,” they said. All was not lost. Both of us started getting our most charming, pitiful faces on, and started making a commotion and asked everyone to raise their hands if they wanted one. Three, four, five…eight, ten…fifteen. We got 22 orders. Thank you GOD. It was a joyous moment. We asked people for $5 each, and the hands went down. “Oh, I thought they were free,” said one guy. No one actually wanted one—they just thought they were free. Severe, utter disappointment.

We were desperate. I asked almost every person in the room individually for $5, and got a total of $20. I asked for the manager, and was pointed to his office. We walked in to find a short, stocky manager wearing bright orange. I explained the situation and asked if he might be able to help out, if he might have it in his heart to buy lunch for the dealership. And he agreed. He asked how much we needed, and I calculated $5.40 (for tax) times $22, and subtracted the $20 we already had. It was just under $100. He reached in his pocket and handed us a $100 bill. It was the first time I truly experienced real love. We thanked him profusely and left, beaming.

One more problem—we needed someone to come back with us. We asked everyone in the main room if anyone would come with us. “To the El Pollo Loco down the street?” someone asked. “No,” I replied. “The one in Winnetka.” People looked at me like I was crazy—“Winnetka?!” (remember, it was 30 minutes away).

Oh god—hope being drained again—misery coming back.

And then Jim walked in.

One of the guys pointed to Jim (a short car mechanic), and said, “Jim will do it.” Everyone laughed. I jumped on this, and started chanting, “Jim! Jim! Jim! Jim!” Frank joined in. Then everyone started doing it. And Jim was like, “What??? Noooo.” And we were giving him our biggest pleading faces possible. And Jim relented! He agreed to go!

[Note: I’m aware how dramatic this sounds—trust me, it actually was this intense]

So, we explained to Jim that we weren’t allowed to hold the money (not knowing what the cameras were there for, I’m sure this seemed bizarre to poor old Jim), and that he had to follow us in his car to Winnetka to get the bowls (most of this scene didn’t make the episode because it would have made no sense why we needed Jim to come back with us).

So we started driving, and Frank and I are trying not to get excited yet, and we’re panicked that we’re gonna lose Jim at a light, or that he’ll just say screw it and turn around.

By now, it’s almost 1pm—we missed most of the rush. We had a bunch of missed calls from Aaron. If we had come back empty-handed, it would have been horrible.

We walked in triumphantly with Jim (who must have been completely freaked out). In the end, that sale accounted for almost 30% of the total sales.

So Frank and I hopped into the sales mix for the final half hour, and the task ended. We went back to the boardroom, and Sean announced that we won. Obviously, this was a great moment (this was the end of day 11—that’s a long time coming). And moving into the house was one of the greatest feelings possible. Of course, they time it so the two teams cross paths as they switch, to maximize awkwardness.

We didn’t have much time to celebrate, as we were told we were leaving for the reward in 30 minutes (most of us didn’t have time to shower).

So we headed to the beach. A waiter handed us some kind of cocktail in a pineapple, and Andrea Bocelli sang for us. Two hours earlier, we had been selling bowls in a fast food restaurant, and now we were sitting on the beach, victorious, drinking out of a pineapple. Intensely satisfying. Bocelli was great, although we couldn’t hear his singing very well—you heard it on TV because there was a microphone. The “concert” was actually just one song. We shook his hand and he left. We were served a ridiculously good dinner, and as soon as the alcohol began to kick in, I headed for the piano. As I played, about four cameras rushed over and circled around me. It was fun. And apparently, I have the posture of a 97-year-old man.

I finished, and headed back over to the group. We all toasted to the team, and to PM Aaron, and talked about our win. Happy times.

Then Surya pointed at me and Nicole and said, “You two are really cute together.” And cue the floodgates to open.

This was the first mention of this by anyone. Then James says, “Yeah, I’ve been noticing that—what’s going on between you two?” And everyone started unleashing the comments. They were all beaming suddenly, and I sat there like an embarrassed 7th grader. What the hell am I supposed to say to this?

Then they all start telling us to dance on the beach barefoot, and I’m like, “I’m not fucking dancing on the beach barefoot.” And they’re like, “Come on!”

Hideous.

It was actually the scene I would have dreaded as a 7th grader.

Luckily, the fireworks changed the topic. They were not much cooler than any other fireworks, but I’m pretty obsessed with any other fireworks, so I was sufficiently in awe.

We all headed back to the house. Frank, Nicole and I started taking shots. The problem was, first Nicole was on the phone (there is a connected phone in the house, but not outside, so this was the first time we were able to contact anyone from the outside world. This was very exciting. I felt like I had been there for 6 months, and the sound of my parents’ and sisters’ voices when I called that night was bizarre and great to hear). Anyway, first Nicole was on the phone so I took shots with Frank. Then Frank was on the phone so I took shots with Nicole. I was getting drunk, fast. I knew what I was doing. Those cameras weren’t going anywhere, and I was in the process of getting liquored up on national TV. And I just didn’t really care. Aaron and Surya refrained, and James and Steph kept it to a minimum. But not the two Italians and I. We had finally won, and I’d be damned if I wasn’t going to celebrate.

Flash to two hours later. Aaron, Surya, James and Steph are in bed sleeping. Frank is passed out next to the pool. I’m sitting on the lawn next to Nicole looking out at the city, wrecked, and saying god knows what to her. I don’t remember much, although Nicole told me the next day that at one point I had said to the camera guy, who was 3 feet away filming, “Why won’t you go away?! I’m here with this girl and you’re all up in my grill.” She claims it was intensely funny at the time.

So I wake up the next morning. Now—you know those mornings when you were really drunk the night before, and you don’t really remember much, but you have faint memories of things you probably should not have done? And you’re just like, “oh, fuuuuck.”

Now, imagine that same feeling, except it was all on national TV. “oh, FUUUUUUCK!”

I got out of bed, and saw Nicole, who said, “heeyyy, you were funny last night” and shook her head laughing.

Nice job, Tim.

So the day rolls on, we all go out on our 3 hour interviews, we sit around the pool happily, and appreciate the fact that we weren’t going to the boardroom. At one point, I heard Aimee and Marisa fighting with each other on the other side of the hedge. This was, of course, intensely amusing. In the minutes before they headed to the boardroom, I popped my head through the hedge and said good luck to them. Marisa (who I was kind of buddies with) came over to me and whispered, “I’m about to get ambushed.” I told her I was rooting for her, although, from doing a bit of eavesdropping (and from talking to Surya, who told me that Marisa did not get along with the team), I was pretty sure she would not be returning.

And ambushed she got.

C’est la vie.