The Apprentice, Episode 7: Duped!

The two project managers argue about which one of them will say first which apartment they want. Katrina tells Troy to be a man and say which place he wants. He counters that she should be a woman and do the same. Katrina pulls out a notepad and says that they should each write down which apartment they want. Troy thinks it’s dumb, but agrees. Katrina writes “3rd Street” on her paper, and Troy writes, “I want what you want.”

In an interview, Troy says that he wrote what he did to wind Katrina up, and it certainly worked. Katrina is livid. “That’s not ethical!” she tells him. In an interview, she says, “Troy is a sleazeball.” Neither of them will bend, so the agent settles their dispute with a coin toss. Troy wins, and Katrina is, as Troy puts it, “mad as a wet hen.”

Okay, let’s take a minute here to look at what happened. Let’s look at Katrina’s side of things first. She knew that neither of them wanted to be the first to admit which apartment they wanted, so she came up with the compromise that they’d each write it down, swap papers, and move on from there. While she was straightforward and wrote what she wanted, Troy just wrote that he wanted what she wanted. This bothered Katrina for two reasons. First of all, Troy agreed to write down the apartment he wanted, and he didn’t do it. He was dishonest and didn’t follow the rules that they had just agreed to. Second, and probably more importantly, Katrina and Troy both know that she knows more about real estate than he does. She knows which apartment is the better prospect due to years of hard work and experience. Troy knows which apartment is better by listening to her talk. It’s like she stayed up all night studying for a test, and he just cheated by looking over her shoulder at the answers.

Then there’s Troy’s point of view. He knows that Katrina has more expertise than he does in this field, so her enthusiasm about the second apartment confirmed his suspicions that it was the one with the most potential. If Katrina were smarter, she wouldn’t have made it so obvious to Troy which apartment was best. When it came time to write down their choices, Troy already knew that she was going to write down 3rd Street since he heard her telling her team she wanted it. No, he didn’t literally write down 3rd Street, but he knew that he wanted the same apartment she did (in fact, he was digging in his pocket for a coin to toss to resolve the dispute before she came up with her paper idea), so he wrote a more teasing response. He probably hoped that teasing her like that would throw her off balance, giving him an edge in the negotiations.

In the end, I think that Troy was obnoxious and a little bit dishonest for not playing by Katrina’s rules in writing down the actual apartment that the wanted. As fellow RNO writer Donna Reynolds put it, “I don’t think it was unethical really, just kind of childish.” If you want to examine unethical behavior by Troy, this pales in comparison to his implying that Kwame was a celebrity in the Planet Hollywood challenge. I also think that Katrina made a big mistake by showing her cards. She made it far too easy for Troy to see which apartment she, the expert, found most desirable, so he was able to snatch it away from her.

The Versacorp team checks out the apartment. Tammy says that it’s going to need a lot of work. Katrina says they’ll need to do lots of painting, and new cabinets will help, too. She tells her team that the other apartment was much worse. Sounds like sour grapes to me, since we just saw her fighting to get it.

Protégé gets to work in their apartment as well. Heidi says that the place is absolutely disgusting, especially the bathroom. They quickly roll up their sleeves and get to work painting – all, that is, except for Omarosa. Omarosa interrupts everyone’s work to call a meeting to review the lists of what she thinks they need to do. Everyone is irritated, including me. They were working, and Omarosa stopped them so that they could talk about how much work they needed to do. It totally reminds me of how on Trading Spaces Paige will interrupt the teams to talk about how time-consuming the projects are, and how she’s worried about the schedule when if she’d shut up and let them work already, they’d be done. Amy says in an interview, “We have meetings for meetings’ sake, and I think it’s because Omarosa didn’t want to get down and dirty.” The meeting is over, and everyone gets back to work, except for Omarosa, who sits on the floor and watches them.

At the end of the day, everyone is exhausted (except, presumably, for Omarosa, who should be fresh as a daisy). Heidi calls home and, after a few minutes of talking to her dad, starts to cry. Her mother has just been diagnosed with stage 1 colon cancer. She tells her dad that if he wants her to, she’ll leave the show to be with her mom. Troy hears her on the phone and comes by to give her a hug. He says in an interview that he feels really bad for the choice she has to make.