The Apprentice 3's Team Networth lost its sixth straight task during last night's NBC broadcast of the show's eleventh episode, making Angie Harper, a 41-year-old gym franchise owner from Lake Balboa, California, the latest Apprentice candidate to be fired.
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Angie, an original Networth member, had shown early promise when she led her team to victory as project manager of The Apprentice 3's third task of the season. However she had struggled to shine or even find her niche within the changing sea of teammates and high pressure assignments of the show's recent episodes, leading to her dismissal.
The Apprentice 3's eleventh episode task was to design an American Eagle Outfitters clothing line that incorporated high tech gadgets such as cell phones, handheld game consoles, and MP3 music players. Alex Thomason, an original Team Magna member who had become Networth's newest member during the previous week's episode, volunteered to be Networth's project manager for the task. On Magna, Tana Goertz, a high-school educated contestant who had moved to Magna during The Apprentice 3's initial corporate reshuffling and has risen to become one of the season's top candidates, volunteered to be project manager..
Tana and teammate Kendra Todd had proven instrumental in securing a Team Magna victory during last week's task, and they once again proved themselves resourceful during this week's assignment, visiting an American Eagle store and interviewing store patrons for ideas on not only what they thought would be useful, but also what they thought important. Meanwhile over at Networth, Alex, a self-described metrosexual, took a different approach and simply drove his team's ideas based on his own instincts.
Under Tana's direction Magna worked efficiently to create a brand name and style, and incorporate the suggestions they obtained from their research into the clothes they designed. Despite continued tension between Kendra and fellow teammate Craig Williams, Tana was able to keep the group focused, even overcoming a situation in which a sloppy vendor mislabeled some of their final prototype clothes.
On the other hand, the three-person Networth team continued to flounder, beginning with the highly unstable Chris Shelton once again jeopardizing a task by spending a large portion of the day trying to retrieve a credit card he lost while purchasing the electronic gadgets for their presentation. Alex's relaxed nature also caused management problems -- first in overtasking Angie to the point where she was overwhelmed, and later in managing the team's time so poorly that they were running very late to make their presentation.
During the presentation to the American Eagle representatives the well prepared Magna impressed their judges with their product knowledge and customer understanding. Meanwhile the rushed Networth team floundered as Angie badly stammered her way through her presentation. Once again, the final decision was easy to see by even the most casual of watchers, as Team Magna won this task decisively.
As a reward for their victory, the Magna members won a shopping spree at Bergdorf Goodman, a famed 5th Avenue New York clothing store, Once there, the contestants were given the run of the store and a personal shopping assistant to help them try out a wide array of clothing including sequined evening gowns, tuxedos, and designer bow-ties. How many they were actually allowed to keep wasn't specified, but needless to say this season has really upped the ante in the reward department.
In the boardroom, Donald Trump began the session by asking Alex what went wrong, and then before Alex could respond, The Donald proceeded to hold Alex blameless for Networth's loss and state that "if you hang around losers, you become one." Wisely taking Trump's comment as an indication that he wasn't in danger of being fired, Alex said little for the reminder of the boardroom session.
Realizing that it now appeared that her chances of being fired had just increased significantly, Angie blamed Chris for his loss of the credit card and also weakly blamed Alex -- who Trump's comments had made clear was getting a pass based on his past performances. Despite having managed to remain mostly calm during his appearance at the previous week's boardroom session, Chris began to lose his temper again, however in the end he still managed to make a few well-reasoned points in between his outbursts.
In a final boardroom where it was clearly a toss up between firing Angie or Chris, The Donald finally decided on Angie, firing her after getting her to admit that she "choked" under pressure.
