Gazing into the Apprentice Abyss

This week has been a week of watersheds, new discoveries and regret.  And all three of these culminated into one moment in time.  The critical point at which my life would change forever came about at 9pm on Wednesday when I wandered into the living room and noticed that the other half had put The Apprentice on the goggle-box.  Up until this time, I had managed to avoid this travestuous excuse for entertainment: I didn’t even know who Stuart Baggs was (although subsequently it pains me to have to for once in my life agree with the purveyor of darkness that is Piers Morgan when he said he had the business brains of a lobotomized aardvark). 

“Welcome to the nadir of your miserable life, ladies and gentlemen.”  The announcer didn’t say.  “please leave your standards at the door and listen to the sounds of souls shattering as they debase themselves before the grand throne solely for the sport of the Dark One himself, Lord Sugar, the twisted evil pubic gnome and his chattering minions.”

But he may as well have done because, as I sank into my seat, I felt the black waters of despair begin to lap about my feet and start to rise with a slow inexorability only seen in the movement of glaciers. 

The line-up was an unprepossessing gaggle of cretins and lickspittles.  I have nothing to really compare them with, having previously taken the policy of jamming my fingers in my ears and shouting “Lalalalalala! Go away!” whenever anyone tried to discuss the toadying lackeys that grasped and clawed at the coattails of the Dark One on previous series, but if the brief was to scrape the bottom of the barrel of humanity I do believe they managed it.

So there I was, stuck on the sofa, watching two groups of people who are allegedly highly successful business wizards with all the mad skills a business ninja requires to be the superest best ever display anything but.   The shambolic nature of, well, everything they did, made me wonder if any of them had ever given a presentation, pitched an idea, worked on a project or, for that matter if any of them knew how to spell the word ‘business’

But on to the task at hand: create an app with a global appeal with the winners being the team whose app has the most global downloads.  With a silent Banzai charge floating around their collective ears and very little going on between aforementioned lugholes, they ran at the project with a level of enthusiastic incompetence that would make Raglan and Lucan of the Light Brigade say “Gosh. Steady on chaps.  Perhaps we should think it through.”

The boys’ room was one giant love-in, with lots of stroking and positive reinforcement and self-congratulation (“Aw we’re brilliant!  Nice one geezer! Go us!  We’re like totally amazing!”) whilst they devised an app of such naffness that only salesmen, readers of redtops, estate agents and recruitment executives would enjoy. Oh and people who buys a certain type of app to then show all their mates:

“Look!  Look!  It’s a pint but on my Iphone.  Brilliant!  But check this out, when I tip it, it’s like I’m like drinking it.  Look! Look! The pint’s emptying.  Awesome.  Wasn’t that cool.  Brilliant.”

The girls were not faring much better, but were working in a far healthier, challenging, confrontational (some might say bloody-minded and argumentative) way:

 “Oo - i had this idea where we can do a thing and get you know, people to, erm, join the thing and it's a thing with, erm, tiddley-faddley rinky-dink bits…”

“Shut up.  Stop talking.  Now.”

“Let me tell you about my idea.  I want to tell you about my idea.  So you’re sitting next to the person and he says, uhh, no wait, he asks you, um like where are we and then you can like, um, no wait, um.”

“Shut it. Don’t test me.”

“But…but.”

“No. Can it.”

(Much glaring and planning of epic slagging off session later.)

Stuff happened and people said some stupid things – the default setting, I believe for the cringing whelps desperate to show Dark One their worth by offering up their own dear granny for the trampling over, by stabbing of as many backs as possible and fighting each other to get to the ultimate boot licking position.

And the result? A couple of crappy apps which managed to get the perfect balance of banality and naffness that would get Idiots from around the globe stabbing furiously at their portable devices and one of which even incorporating a side serving of lazy racism – Welsh people, valleys. Geddit? – that would only appeal to a few lobotomized aardvarks across the world.

We also saw a few bloody noses and bruised egos, the beginnings of a few hate campaigns and a raft of mind-meltingly stupid quotes that are already being jotted down and snickered over by the highbrow and lowbrow alike. 

“'I'm not a show pony, or a one-tricky pony. I'm not a jack-ass or a stubborn mule, and I'm definitely not a wild stallion that needs to be tamed. I am the champion thoroughbred that this process requires." 

And there was me, Jim Eastwood, thinking you were an idiot.  Note to self: Champion thoroughbred.  Not nitwit. 

"My positive approach and very good looks make me stand out from the crowd." 

Thank you Vincent Disneur, for your modest self-appraisal. Was that sweat or essence of handsomeness oozing out of your pores when you were tanking your pitch?

As the episode wound up, the Dark One was positively crackling with malevolent glee, as the spineless project manager vacillated between his choices for who was to get the superkicking in the Boardroom (a place that is mentioned in hushed tones, we are on sacred ground doncherknow?) and having delivered his opinions in a manner that put me to thinking of a West Highland Terrier chewing on a dead snail, the Dark One did his mystical pointy finger thing and uttered the magical words:

“You’re fired.”

And, before our very eyes, one sweaty contestant was consigned to the dungheap.  But what of the rest?  A collective mopping of brows, feeble attempts at self-justification and the working out of which fellow-competitor to screw over next.

As the closing credits rolled, my head was buzzing with thoughts and questions. They do all this for a measly quarter of a million?  Is your dignity and professional pride worth £250,000?  What on earth could possibly be the job prospects for an Apprentice reject?  Surely nobody in their right mind would employ a person who not only displays stunning incompetence but also clearly hasn’t got the nous to keep his or her uselessness under wraps?  How can such nincompoopery be permitted in a public forum?  Do I even care? 

As Neitzsche said in Aphorism 146 of Beyond Good and Evil:

“When you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.”

I’ve watched the Apprentice now, and my soul has been dirtied and some kind of dirty you just can’t scrub clean.

But why tea lights? Why is it always tea lights?

Yesterday morning at 10.20 am I found myself standing in the dark, staring at a door like Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Match Girl.  Like the little Match Girl, I was hovering in the gloom feeling cold and desperate, but unlike the protagonist of the sad story about the dreams and hopes of a dying girl I was not alone. No lonely vigil for me: that morning I had easily 100 people standing in the shades of artificial crepuscularity waiting and yearning to get through the doors.

My presence in this place was entirely unplanned: my morning was supposed to consist of noodling about in the sun, not this.  Not lurking like a troll under a bridge on a perfectly good day.  Certainly not standing in a line of cretins whose idea of a good trip out on a Sunday morning is going to IKEA and, to be extra certain that they do not miss a single moment of the experience, have arrived long before the shop actually opens.  Why would you do this?  Why, if you know the shop opens at 10.30, would you arrive up to half an hour early so you can stand around in the dark? What kind of insanity brings a person to do this?  I suppose the kind of insanity that leads people to queue overnight for a lousy half-price sale at Currys or swarm through the doors of Selfridges to try and snag that once in a lifetime bargain or, the Saints preserve us, to camp overnight to attend a JLS book signing.

The reason why I was lurking at the entrance to IKEA, with the thought “Man, I hate IKEA!” running repeatedly through my head is neither here nor there, but I must emphasise at this juncture that I was in this queue by mistake.  I had absolutely no intention of getting there super early, as can be evidenced by the fact that I thought the place opened at 10 and so was quite taken aback when we pulled into the car park to find it pretty empty, with cars circling like vultures round the concrete pillars, their lights sweeping across the entrance and bouncing back from the startled eyes of the expectant Morlocks; only the promise of brightly coloured, affordable homeware keeping them from scattering further into the darkness. 

I parked up and drifted across to the Gateway to Heaven beyond which could be found the Escalator of Destiny, the Hallway of Unimaginably Fabulous Lifestyles, the Caverns of Unintended Purchase, the Maze of the Wizards of the Storeroom and finally the home of Nommi, the Norse God of Meatballs.  Mmm, tasty tasty meatballs.  So popular, they have their own Facebook page.  But I digress.

What is this phenomenon?  Why are we prepared to go through the stress, disorientation and misery and the innumerable bags of tea lights and spoon covers that we somehow find ourselves clutching onto when we emerge exhausted at the other end?  What is it about the place that gets under people’s skin? Why does it make people act weirdly, and I mean seriously weirdly? With people actually dying?  Where even ’celebrities’ fall foul of the urge to buy tea lights, which just going to show that nobody is immune to the unintended purchase effect.

Because it’s IKEA, that’s why! We flippin’ love IKEA.  Everything. Especially their delightful naming conventions, which seems to be a great argument against nominative determinism.  Charm the egg slicer and Fantastisk the napkin, are two golden examples of the product not really living up to their names.

So it is perhaps understandable that, back outside the Gateway to Heaven, excitement was at fever pitch as the hapless security chap switched on the Escalator of Destiny, wandered over to the door and fumbled with a large set of keys.  An actual cheer went up when the doors finally open and I, with my eyes rolling like a fruit machine, joined the throng of mong disappearing through the entrance, eager to part with their cash on things that they never knew existed, let alone wanted.   

And one hour and forty precious minutes later, I emerged battle-worn but victorious, having successfully negotiated every obstacle, even the deadly Sirens (cheap coffee and even cheaper hotdogs).  With dignity and wallet mostly intact, I stepped into the light and back to humanity with only one thought on my mind.

“Man, I love IKEA!”