THE first contestant who manages to sell an Amstrad Emailer will win The Apprentice, Sir Alan Sugar said last night.
The Amstrad chairman said there was no higher accolade in the business world than selling one of the hybrid phone-email devices.
Sir Alan said: "When I started making the Emailer a lot of people said to me, 'what a waste of time. What a stupid, pointless waste of time. What a pathetic, embarrassing, idiotic waste of time'.
"'Who, in the name of Christ, would ever want one of these?' they would ask me, over and over again.
"But I kept making them – thousands and thousands of them – never losing faith that one day someone would come along who would actually be able to shift one of them."
He added: "The sales pitch is quite tricky because you basically have to make the punter believe he doesn't have a computer.
"I've sat through so many meetings where I'd say to the customer, 'you don't have a computer' and he would immediately say, 'yes I do – here it is, on my desk'.
"I'd then finish the meeting by telling him I'd send an email with some prices and he would say, 'okay, that's fine, I'll read it on my computer'."
Sir Alan said the winning contestant not only has to sell the Emailer but produce a photograph of the customer using it to send an email to himself which he will then read on his computer.
Meanwhile Lucinda Legerwood, the latest contestant to be fired, claimed she had been victimised because of her upper-class manner, but insisted she had 'no desire to sell Sky boxes to scum anyway'.
