Doing it Wrong: Ugg Boots and Embezzled Weddings

Back in the mid-’90s, my friend Val and I decided to take a personal day by feigning illnesses and treating ourselves to a lunch out and a matinee movie.

Mike: “It…’s a stomach thing. Best if I stay home in close proximity to the facilities.”

Val: “I have chronic fatigue syndrome.”

(“Wait, why did you tell them you had chronic fatigue syndrome?” “Because Stevie Nicks had it, but she still looks great.” “I don’t think cocaine abuse causes chronic fatigue syndrome.”)

We didn’t plan on being part of an armed gunman hostage situation at the KOIN Tower Theater. And, actually, we weren’t part of the armed gunman hostage situation, we were just in the same building where said situation was situationing. Still: that didn’t stop us from being filmed in a line of witnesses, looking well-fed but confused by both our current predicament (“No one’s going to watch the evening news, right?”) and Meg Ryan’s cockney accent from the film we’d just watched. (“Maybe I could be a dialogue coach, if those are the typical results.”)

As it turned out, the evening news was more popular than Val or I expected (who knew?), and our illnesses were exposed for the shams they were. (“Seriously? Chronic fatigue?” “Cher suffers too, you know.”) And the lesson I’ve learned is: NEVER LIE. Especially at work.

I wish I had written all of this in a private email to Kristy Lane of Lancashire, Britain. Maybe my failure/lesson learned could have been her success/lesson achieved. Instead, she’s looking at both jail time AND a pretty hampered job hunt once she’s done serving her sentence. (“There’s an employment gap between 2011 and 2015. What’s that about?” “Funny story, you see…”)

Lane is accused of embezzling nearly £170,000 from her employer. After adjusting for currency rates and the value of the dollar, that works out to approximately all the money in the world, U.S.

Lane needed the money because she was getting married and Ugg boots aren’t cheap and Ugg boots are SUPER classy in a wedding (editor’s note: They are not). She also wanted a firework display, a harpist, a saxophone player, a magician, a DJ, and two bands.

And a free bar, face painting and feathered masks for her guests.

And a white stretch limousine.

AND a £1,500 jewel-encrusted case for her iPad.

She might have gotten away with it (editor’s note: no she wouldn’t have) if she had not done these two things:

(1) Complained loudly and often about how broke she was all the time. (The Express UK reports that “the company, Pure AV, had loaned Lane £7,000 and increased her wages after she complained she was struggling financially.”)

(2) Invited her boss to her lavish, saxaphone-player face-painting Ugg-boots-wearing-bridesmaids wedding at a Tudor manor.

Turns out, Lane had been stealing from her company for two years: “[Lane] had been using real invoices to existing suppliers to create extra payments into her own bank account.” Once her boss was back in the office (while Lane was on the first of her proposed TWO honeymoons), he started looking into some accounting shenanigans and unraveled the whole thing. Lane’s boss, Peter Sutton, said, “If she had been in work when the problem surfaced she would have been able to hide it, like she had for so long. But because I was already getting suspicious, it all started to come out. It was a very clever, incredibly devious operation that was calculated to the ‘nth’ degree.”

I’ll close with my favorite part of the Examiner article:

“It took two months to uncover the full extent of the deception, after which Lane was arrested and prevented from going on a two-month honeymoon to Mexico.” (emphasis added, and necessary, because she’d already gone on one honeymoon and this was a second honeymoon and when I got married, we didn’t even GO on a honeymoon, we just visited friends in Livermore, California. LIVERMORE.)

Embezzled weddings? Doing. It. Wrong.