Episode Report Card Miss Alli: B- | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT All up in your grill
By Miss Alli | Season 2 | Episode 5 | Aired on 10.06.2004
George now asks Pamela why she brought Maria into the Boardroom. Entirely too self-satisfied, Maria grins tightly and says, "I'd like to know as well." Maria, George is not asking because he cannot understand why you were brought in. That's not what that means in this context. Pamela says that the reason Maria is in with her is that Maria identified herself as a good public speaker. Pamela relied on Maria's representations of her own abilities, and as Maria herself breaks in to say, the rest of the group also encouraged Pamela to put Maria on this task. And then...not so much. Asked by Carolyn why she then was not the person who did most of the presentation, Maria hedges tremendously in saying that when they did the rehearsal, they wound up feeling like her "rate of speech was not necessarily something that they would be able to identify with." Which is a nice way of saying that everyone who watched Maria speak on camera thought that she was on speed. Carolyn says she agrees that Maria's style was a problem. Trump asks Maria whether she thinks she's good on camera, and Maria insists that she's "great on camera." Maria could not be more wrong, I'll tell you that right now. Just something to chew on for later: is it worse to have a poor grasp of the abilities of someone who you just started working with that day, or to have a poor grasp of your own abilities and misrepresent them to your boss? I'll let you think on that one. Trump starts to blame Pamela for having taken Maria's word for it that she was a good public speaker, but Pamela protests that in person, Maria is in fact a good speaker with "a great presence." She says, however, that when they turned the camera on Maria, Maria completely freaked out. Which appeared to be exactly what happened. Pamela points out that she had to replace Maria 15 minutes before the presentation started.
Trump asks Stacy what she thinks of Maria, and Stacy of course turns it into a question about Pamela, saying that Maria is very good, and simply wasn't used properly by Pamela. Stacy insists that Pamela "doesn't want to take accountability." At this point, they're just going to have to take accountability for their own grammar and usage. Stacy makes the absolutely preposterous comment that she thinks Pamela did a poor job of "assessing [their] skill sets," when she made Maria a speaker because Maria said she was a speaker, and when she made Stacy the lawyer because Stacy said she was a lawyer. How can anyone make that argument with a straight face? Pamela explains how she went around and asked them what their skills were, and adds that, when what they wanted to do coincided with what they told her their skills were, that's what she assigned them to do. She finds it remarkable that now, those same people are claiming they weren't used properly in being actually given those roles. I agree. Trump starts in about how Pamela has to be willing to assess people for herself, but I don't understand how she could possibly have done that, having had only that one task to work with them.