Learning to live in luxury
How delightful it is to see the art of concealing purchases from husbands reach a new high.
I refer to the Wellington fraudster who stole $220,000 from her employer, yet managed to score three other jobs while she was on bail with name suppression.
It's not so much the amount of money she snaffled, or her silver tongue at interviews, that impresses me. It's the way her husband noticed nothing. What training he'd had. This woman was fantastic.
Most of us smuggle a new shoebox into the house muttering something inaudible about "sales" and "mrgdmph" – meaning "French" and "$500" in the language of women, which men seem so often to be tuned out from. This is our reward for the many other key questions they ignore, like "Does she look older than me?", and key words such as "dishes" and "lawnmower".
This husband must have been trained to live behind an open newspaper permanently, and be devoid of all observational skills, so adept has she been at bringing the packages home.
The unnamed woman told the court in January, when she pleaded guilty, that her husband knew nothing of her offending, and was even unaware of how much she was paid: "He did question me and I always told him it was a bonus structure," was her entertaining riposte.
She puts me in mind of Lisa Clement, the Winz worker who managed to get away with $1.9 million from her employer, and was in a position to repay only a possible $250,000 after her shopping spree. She was jailed in 2004.
You'd think the pile of plastic bags and swing tags might have alerted the family, but her husband, too, was oblivious. There was something good on the telly for a very long time, I guess, and you wouldn't even press the mute button for the ads.
Yet while admiring these women for their sheer gall, their cases raise worrying issues to do with the education system. How could two obviously intelligent women have so much spending money, and spend it with such a lack of class? What are we teaching in our schools if not the appreciation of the truly finer things in life?
At the end of the day the unnamed woman hasn't much to show for all the money – except, perhaps, a Chihuahua she paid $1500 for. She has seven Louis Vuitton Handbags for it to piddle in, two Gucci women's watches, one for each wrist, but used, two designer black leather jackets (yawn), a diamond solitaire ring (sigh), a gold bangle with diamonds (bigger sigh), and a man's yellow and white gold ring which she probably told him came out of a cereal packet.
Oh, there was an $8000 leather lounge suite, two LCD televisions and a laptop – but what are they worth second-hand? Police seized goods worth a tragic $20,000. Presumably the rest went on facials, Chihuahua pedicures and cornflakes.
I have nothing against Louis Vuitton, but would have admired Prada purchases more. Besides, there are so many fake Louis Vuitton products in Asia that who can tell the difference any more? And as for Gucci, did she know no more about quality goods than the ads in old magazines?
Clement had far more money at her disposal, but had equally baffling taste in bling, and remained in her Wainuiomata ex-statey, spending far more on doing it up than the house was worth. Her list of buys included Lord of the Rings figurines, 54 cat statuettes, a radio-controlled model tank, power tools and boxed war games. Every major tat business in Wellington must have benefited from her largesse, but in the end she had nothing wonderful to show for it. Her husband got some James Bond memorabilia, but obviously was no secret agent himself.
Anyone curious enough to ask Clement how she could afford her lifestyle was told she'd had a large inheritance, was getting paid a good salary, and got great bonuses. She, too, was a wit.
Seriously, though, did it not occur to these women to fly to Paris and go quietly mad in Galleries Lafayette? Where was their imagination?
With all the troubles over NCEA, this points to a more serious situation than I thought. Now's the time to include luxury shopping and elite brand recognition in the curriculum, so future fraudsters will cause less embarrassment.