Your employment has been terminated

We've gone and got ourselves our first apprentices. Maddie and Meg were picked from Word Experience – a two-day work experience type thing where we invite 20 second-year uni students to Writer HQ.

Maddie and Meg are joining us for two weeks over Easter, three weeks in the summer and one week at Christmas. We'll show them the ways of the business writing world and get them making tea. Kidding.

This week marks their first week with us. So we thought it'd be rather fitting if they blogged about all the hot air on The Apprentice.

Our apprentices on The Apprentice

Hooray. It’s back. Another series of Lord Sugar wannabes who inevitably look like Big Brother contestants. But in suits. The difference is, this lot like to use business clichés and abstract metaphors almost as much as the boys’ team love their nasal-strips.*

The task this week was to design some kind of household gadget. The boys, being out-there, came up with a bin. But like the entrepreneurs they are, they called it a ‘waste compactor recycling appliance’. Which is about as easy-on-the-ears as Jenna’s voice.

Rhyming phrases seemed popular too. ‘All the gear but no idea’ was said by the unfortunately-named Ricky Martin. This from the guy who described himself in his audition video as ‘the reflection of perfection’. And Azhar, obviously made delirious by the team's design prowess, wrongly referred to himself as the ‘killer whale of the sea world’. Ahem.

At least no-one is yet to be inspired by Ed from the last series. He used the phrase ‘rolling with the punches’ every 2.47 seconds until we all wanted to roll a punch into his face.

The boys’ second genius idea came from greengrocer Adam. ‘Magic Hands’ were washing-up gloves with a scourer and sponge stuck to them. But at least the name gave you an idea of what it was. Less of a mouthful than ‘waste compactor recycling appliance’.

Thankfully, the elaborately-named invention was shortened to Eco-Press. Much more human-friendly.

By Maddie

*Stephen’s a big fan. He got up to answer the phone just to show off his breathing aid/deep cleansing strip.

And here's another

Right. Let’s all stop hating on Maria for having a snooze in the car. You’d be exhausted too if you had to cavort around London in rush hour, hawking a bit of plastic for £17.99.

What’s more annoying is the contestants’ strange habit of complicating simple words. In the boys’ corner last night, they were so eager to sound businessy that Stephen called compost ‘produce’ and ‘goods’. While Duane was banging on about putting the cafetiere-cum-composter on his desktop. Desktop?

And it was no better when it came to the girls and their Alanis Morisette-esque faux pas*. Ladies, it’s not really ironic that there’s water on the floor after you’ve put up the Splish-Splash. That’s just a product that doesn’t work.

Somebody else that had a problem with it was Lord Sugar himself. He asked the people of Twitter** if they could ‘believe that piece of junk?’ He was referring to the toy. Sorry, ‘entertainment centre’.

Oh dear, girls. You should’ve gone with the pointless ‘tap cosy’ after all.

By Meg

*She thought it was ironic to have rain on her wedding day and a black fly in her Chardonnay.

**If you’re not following Lord Sugar yet, do it now. His tweets are so brutal and so grammatically inaccurate they make for a cracking read.