One of the most brilliant and productive techies I ever worked with spent a good deal of her workday watching soap operas on a little b&w TV plunked on her desk. Oh, and while watching the soaps, C also knit sweaters. Gorgeous sweaters. Intricately patterned sweaters.
Lesser, less talented employees would grumble, but their grumbling was for naught. Which was exactly what it should have been for.
When C did her coding, she was fast and meticulous. Her programming tended to be bug free, kludge free, elegant. She was also brilliant at cleaning up spaghetti code and debugging problems no one else could solve.
And when she was watching All My Children and knitting yet another sweater, C was also thinking – thinking out how she was going to write her brilliant, flawless code. So when she sat down to code, she was able get her work-work done really fast.
I thought of C the other day when I read that Canal Productions, Robert De Niro’s company, is suing a former employee for binge-watching Friends and other shows while on the job. That and for embezzling millions of dollars out of the Canal Productions till and light-fingering millions of De Niro’s frequent flyer miles.
I couldn’t find much scoop on Chase Robinson, other than that she was hired to be an assistant to De Niro in 2008. (Her LinkedIn profile gave up precious little information.) But she was able to rise through the ranks pretty quickly, and became the VP of Production and Finance at Canal.
I don’t imagine that there was all that much to do as VP of Production and Finance, given that Canal is a loan-out company, an outfit created to turn an entertainer into a corporate entity for purposes of getting “loaned-out” to movies, TV shows, and advertisers.
Whatever she did or didn’t do, she was making $300K a year. Where do I sign up?
Rhetorical question, of course.
I’m guessing that I wouldn’t quite fit the requirements for assistant to a star.
And I’m sure I’m being cynical here, but lemme guess that she was a pretty and eager young thing when hired, and may have been a tiny bit underqualified for her post as VP of Production and Finance.
Robinson appears to have picked up on how to work the finance side pretty quickly:
A review of the books, in wake of her leaving, found Robinson allegedly used the company’s American Express card to spend tens of thousands of dollars on lavish trips, floral arrangements, iPhones, Uber rides, a Louis Vuitton handbag, dogsitters and pricey dinners. She also allegedly used 3 million of De Niro’s frequent flyer miles for personal trips and vacations while transferring 5 million to her personal account — estimated to be valued at $125,000 in total. Because of her senior role within the company, Robinson was also able to approve her own expenses, including a bogus LA business trip in March 2018 that allegedly turned out to be for a friend’s birthday — racking up a $5,000 bill during the three-day trip, according to the suit. (Source: Page Six)
That “bogus LA business trip” was ostensibly to deliver some autographed coffee-table books to friends of De Niro and to charities that he supported. Hmmmm. Isn’t that what FedEx and UPS are for?
As for transferring 5 million in frequent flyer miles to her own account from De Niro’s…Maybe I should have had Robinson personally assisting me when I failed in my attempts to transfer 500K worth of my husband’s Delta miles to my account after he died.
Other expenses included racking up $32K in Uber rides over a two-year period. That’s more than $1K per month. Maybe she was Ubering from store to store find a Vuitton bag that was just right. Oh, and she sent herself a $1.3K flower arrangement for her very own birthday. Happy Birthday to me? Or maybe it was signed “Love, Bob.”
The company says she rarely came into the office, and alleges she spent “astronomical amounts of time” watching Netflix during work hours. The company alleges that during a four-day period in January, she watched 55 episodes of “Friends.” On one of those days, she ordered lunch from Caviar San Francisco and had dinner at Paola’s Restaurant, charging both meals on the company card.
Over another four-day period in March, she allegedly watched 20 episodes of “Arrested Development” and 10 episodes of “Schitt’s Creek.” (Source: Variety)
De Niro’s company is looking for $6 million in damages.
“Watching shows on Netflix was not in any way part of or related to the duties and responsibilities of Robinson’s employment and, on information and belief, was done for her personal entertainment, amusement and pleasure at times when she was being paid to work,” the suit alleges.
I haven’t actually seen any episodes of these shows, so I can’t tell whether it’s possible to watch them and get work done (even if it’s work of the “think things through variety”), but I do know that whatever the size of a company, if someone is pulling down $300K to do nothing – which kind of sounds like what her “duties and responsibilities” were - there’s some pretty piss-poor management going on.
And it is never a good idea to give someone signing authority over their own “business” expenses.
Sets up a dicey situation in the making if you have a piss-poor employee okaying her own expenses for dog-sitting. Unless the dog-sitting costs were incurred when Robinson was on that trip to LA for her friend’s b-day party and/or to deliver those coffee table books.
Robinson apparently quit last spring, just before she would have been fired, and – enterprising woman that she is – drafted up a reference letter for herself. Which De Niro refused to sign. At least she didn’t forge his signature.
Anyway, still can’t figure out why binging on Netflix was such a big deal. After all, the binge watching likely distracted her from looting even more from Canal’s coffers.
I’ll be interested to see how this one ends up. (And wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a Me, Too moment in the future of this contretemps.)
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