Capricious. Thats what sugar was. And he does not have the wisdom of solomon. Far from it. The bbc should can the series.

Nick and la brady were shown up as sycophants, too.

The customer is always right. LS was the customer. It's not what he wanted so he was perfectly within his rights to reject it.

As for the "expert guaranteed it" - he wasn't an expert, just someone on the checkout at a bookshop.

A similar thing happens all of the time in my line of work. You get a specification from the customer but when you present the work to them they say "that's not what I meant". You can't argue the toss, you just have to go back and do it again. Of course it the real world if you had any query about the spec you would check it with the customer and had they don that in this task then there's no way Sugar would have said that a paper one was acceptable.

But it isn't anatomically correct in all dimensions. If I put my hand around a rib or the tibia or the hip bone, that was made of plastic I'd be able to understand the shape of a bone and how it feels.

If I put my hand around the paper skeleton bones and ran my hand over it to feel all I'd get is a paper cut not an impression of how the bone looks (in all dimensions) and feels. That to me is anatomically correct.

A silver cloche has some silver in it. One with no silver in it, or silver colour visible, wouldn't count . Its not specified whether that means thin plate, or painted silver , or made of silver of some set quality., You have to specify that too, or you will find the price varies by a factor of hundreds. Cloche's don't usually come in kit form- most skeletons sold today will do.

If you say I want a skeleton if anything , that implies bone. Anatomically either implies identical (which nothing will be as the bones will be empty and there will be no tissie to hold things in place) or it just means correctly sized and proportioned , with all the bits there. Nothing else will feel like, weigh like, or bend like bone, so, If you say you want a representative skeleton, not one with bone, it could turn up made of anything. Plastic, wood, metal, paper mache, paper ,or cardboard.....could all be anatomivcally correct. One he accepts a plastic version, its difficult to see why one made of anything else wouldn't count . Most of those models of skeletons will come in kits too . if you want a made up kit, you have to specify its made up.

Very interesting scenario, and much less easy to second-guess.

I think there is far too much is it/ isn't it a skeleton discussion and not enough was it likely/ not likely to please LS. His judgements are never going to be complex or nuanced. The discussions remind me of what a trainer once called 'what-iffery' on a course I was on. We were dealing with the not-very-likely scenario of what you must do if you find a dead horse in the street. People went on and on about whether the procedure was the same if it was a dead donkey, or a dead cow, or a dead camel on the Old Kent Road. In the end, the instructor told us to use our common sense.

LS's specifications are never going to look like a legal document, in which you can scroll through all the clauses and look for clever ways round them. It is always going to be a matter of seeing the way he is thinking. On this occasion, it is reasonable to suggest he wanted something that looked convincingly like a human skeleton, nothing more complicated than that.

It would have been genuinely interesting if someone had spent 10 times as much to get a genuine skeleton, then tried to have the other one disqualified. But the flat-packed paper skeleton was just not what LS would think looked like a skeleton. I really don't think it can be taken any further than that.

Technically, it fitted the requirements. I wasn't sure how LS would take it, but I thought he would have to accept it, even if he wasn't happy about it. He just doesn't like people trying to be clever.

Doesn't matter a damn - as Sugar, says he is the Judge, Jury and Executioner - end of.

In fairness, that's never been a concern on the show.As just one example, look at the Coach Trips task - the slop that Daniel dished up as 'lunch' (with an extra charge for a drink), and James and Jemma's comedic attempts at tour guiding, including running out of time and shepherding their customers back on the coach.

In a real world situation, both teams would have had to deal with multiple refunds, but any concept of value for money was completely ignored. It's frankly distasteful of Lord Sugar to demand complete adherence to his own (vague) specs, but previously not give a toss about the poor saps who signed up to such sub-par tours, as long as profit was made...

But you still get paid for the work you've done up to the point where they tell you to do something different, right?

I mean, if you don't, what's to stop a client from asking for, say "a skateboard" at a cost of £30 and then, when you present them with a skateboard, they ask for a bigger skateboard, with an engine and seats...and then, when you present them with a go-kart, they say they want a "skateboard" made of aluminium, about 20ft long, with a V8 engine in the back and a Ferrari badge on the bonnet?

In business, when clients change or refine their specifications, they pay for the changes.

In business there will be some kind of contract. A client may specify whatever they want, but can't then say that they wanted something wildly different. So in this instance, if a client asked for a 'human skeleton at least 1.5 meters tall', it would be reasonable for them to expect whatever you got them to be assembled before they coughed up for it, but not for them to suddenly say, "oh, and I meant gold-plated".

Yep, absolutely should have counted for me.

Cock up by whoever wrote the specs or one blatant arbitrary decision from Sugar too far imo.

I've ordered a few things recently that weren't specified assembled or not. Some were, some weren't. The most surprising was a conductor heater where the feet weren't fitted - simply because they were both necessary and it made no difference to the packaging if they had been. I didn't send it (or any of the other things) back - I simply assembled it (them)!

That's life! Some things come definitely assembled, some definitely don't, and some you're not sure. I would personally expect a skeleton not to be tbh, but would be nicely surprised if it was!



Spot on, and as I said on the 'farce' thread possibly the worst ever example for me, which you've put so well.

Pretty much everything except your first sentence is redundant there.

Yes, there SHOULD be a contract. And if the conditions of the contract are met, no amount of discussion about what the contract "meant" matters.
It's either in the contract or it isn't and, if it isn't, you can't moan about it.

In this case, the "contract" was the specification for the skeleton.
Was there anything in that specification which specified what material the skeleton should be made from or whether it should be fully assembled?

Sure, it had to be "anatomically correct" but you could take a genuine human skeleton (which is, clearly, anatomically correct), shove it in a tupperware box and it doesn't stop being "anatomically correct" even though it's been disassembled and put in a tupperware box.

I'll grant you that they would have had a stronger case if they'd bothered to build the paper skeleton (and, maybe, that laziness is what AS really objected to) but they didn't actually fail to adhere to the "contract". They just did the minimum required work to fulfill it.

'Human skeletons' tend to come already assembled, it's more a case of disassembling them!

But no, if I ordered (a contract) a skeleton I wouldn't expect it to come assembled unless specified by me or the seller, quite the opposite - I'd expect self-assembly.

100% categorically YES the skeleton should have been accepted.

Ridiculous imo that Sugar dismissed what was actually quite an astute move.

It depends. Some contracts are done on a fixed price basis others on "time and materials".

See, if I was Lord Sugar and objected to the paper skeleton because I felt outwitted by Felipe I would have used this excuse to reject it;

"this was a negotiation task, you had to pay less than the asking price, you paid full price so it is DISQUALified" oops he slipped into Brendan from coach trip mode there for a minute.

That would have saved all the argument about if it was acceptable.

I tend to agree that if they had negotiated the price down it should have been accepted.

The paper skeleton wasn't anatomically correct, whether assembled or not. Therefore it didn't meet the spec.

If Sugar had asked for a Rolls Royce and Felipe gave him a full scale replica made out of paper that would not be acceptable either. It wasn't a smart move to try and cut corners on this task.

A chromed cloche wouldn't have counted, it has no silver in it. That was the point being made.

To be an anatomical skeleton the bones have to be correct in 3D form. That can be achieved by moulding plastic or papier-mâché, carving wood, milling metal, etc. but it can't be achieved from flat sheets of paper or cardboard. If you look at the pictures on the eBay link the bones are flat where they should be rounded.

I think that basically sums it up. At the very least it was taking a chance-there can be no crying foul it went belly up.

That's the key point. The last thing Sugar likes is being tricked by a smart-arse lawyer. Sometimes you wonder if the candidates have ever seen the show before.

While I still think it was a foolhardy move to try that sort of "creative" interpretation of the brief on the most expensive item - I could have actually understood it more if Daniel had just driven home and grabbed a kosher chicken out of the fridge, since it would probably have still been rejected, but with a comparatively small fine - now that I think about it, Felipe actually did to Lord Sugar what that butcher did to Syed all the way back in Series 2. Syed left a message on their answering machine saying he needed "100 chickens," and since he didn't specify a weight or price, the butcher clearly thought "Oh well, he obviously means 100 of the most gigantic chickens we carry, and he probably won't mind paying triple the usual market price either."

With Felipe we can perhaps give him some leeway but he's a lawyer and you always expect them to do their research before they'll give you an answer to anything.

Think that Monkseal's blog finally puts this case to rest, as this is the actual specification in the folder:

Human Skeleton
Specifications: Full-sized Anatomical Skeleton, Mininum 150cm tall

How can people reason against this

Thankyou!

I've made the point three times now.

I thought it was clear when I said if you put your hand round the cardboard bone it won't feel the same in your hand as the plastic which would feel the same shape as a real bone.

Ok this is what it's like.

It's like saying buy me a ball and someone buys you a cardboard cutout picture of a tennis ball. There's two parts that slot together so it's 3D and if you spin it it looks like a ball in all dimensions, but I'd you held it in your hand it wouldn't feel like a tennis ball.

That's why the cardboard skeleton isn't anatomically correct because it's really just a 2D drawing with a bit of work to give it some depth, but the depth is not representative or in any way like a real skeleton, hence it's not anatomically correct.

If the 2D paper skeleton is considered anatomically correct then a drawing/painting/life sized puzzle/ light projection would also be permissible.

The difference with the plastic is you could look at any part from any angle or feel it and would look and feel exactly like a real bone and THAT is what is meant by anatomically correct,

Even my husband and I were divided on this, which is indicative of general opinion. I thought it showed initiative, but essential that it was made up first. Putting something 3 dimensional in front of Lord Sugar, may have slightly defused things. Whereas the contrast of having Nick slam a flat pack in front of Lord Alan, turned it into pure slap stick!.