Summit 1 Video Script
UNIT 10
TV Documentary:
The Work Obsession
PART 1
Cynthia McFadden: Robin Cohen gets going early.
Robin Cohen: Go to a spinning class. I’ll shower,
get out of the club. Taxi! I’ll head towards work.
Cynthia McFadden: She pretty much never stops.
Robin Cohen: Hi, Jerry. It’s Robin. I’m OK. I’m in
a cab.
Robin’s receptionist: Good morning, Robin
Cohen’s office.
Cynthia McFadden: Cohen is a highly charged
New York lawyer.
Robin Cohen: Robin Cohen. It’s Robin Cohen.
Robin’s receptionist: Can I put you on hold for a
second?
Robin Cohen: I’ll be here for at least fifteen
minutes.
Cynthia McFadden: She works twelve to fourteen
hours a day. Job requirement or your
requirement?
Robin Cohen: It’s definitely not a job requirement.
Cynthia McFadden: You love it.
Robin Cohen: I love what I do.
Cynthia McFadden: But if she works a lot, clinical
psychologist Chad Emrick works even more. It’s
4:00 A.M. in Denver, and Emrick is already on
his way into the office.
Chad Emrick: I would say, in a sense, work is my
life. It’s most all of my life.
Cynthia McFadden: Emrick finds work to do even
though his first patient won’t show up for
hours.
Chad Emrick: I am here early in the morning ’til
late at night. I, most of the time, shower here. I
keep my clothes here so that when I change
clothes for the day, I do that here.
Chad’s receptionist: Does he ever take a day off?
No. He’s usually here every day.
Cynthia McFadden: He sees patient . . .
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Chad Emrick: Let’s do it.
Cynthia McFadden: . . . after patient, long into the
night.
Chad Emrick: It’s been pretty much this way for at
least ten years. But I love doing what I’m doing.
Cynthia McFadden: The question for him and
anyone that works crazy hours because they say
they love it is this—at what cost? Emrick was
separated from his wife for over a year and
believes he also damaged his relationships with
his other children due to his work.
Jason Emrick: I bet you he feels that way, that he
lost his family. He just kind of disappeared. You
know, he was just at work.
Cynthia McFadden: Professor Bryan Robinson of
the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, is
the first person to ever study the children of
workaholics. He wrote about it in this book
called Chained to the Desk.
Bryan Robinson: My office is filled with adults who
come from workaholic homes, who have this
hole. And the hole is usually, “I never really had
my father or my mother there. They were always
too busy working.” And the feeling is, “I wasn’t
important enough in their life.”
Cynthia McFadden: Robinson is convinced people
can become addicted to work just like they can
to alcohol. Regardless of what that does to their
lives, his groundbreaking research shows that
their children can suffer the same sorts of
problems that have been previously reported for
children of alcoholics. Far beyond just wishing
daddy or mommy was home more, Robinson is
talking about depression, anxiety, and other
disorders that he believes can emotionally
cripple these kids later in life—all caused by
their parents’ attitudes towards work. Robinson
has been nationally recognized for his research,
yet he still faces a lot of skepticism about his
conclusion that workaholism is a disease of the
mind. But he maintains that is exactly what
separates workaholics headed for trouble from
people who are just hard workers. So what
about Chad Emrick and Robin Cohen, who
agreed to let Robinson review their attitudes
about work?
Summit 1 Video Script
PART 2
Cynthia McFadden: So what about Chad Emrick
and Robin Cohen, who agreed to let Robinson
review their attitudes about work? As much as
they may seem the same, when we showed
tapes of the two to Robinson, he saw a big
difference. In general, how hard do you work?
That’s because he says workaholism has
nothing to do with how many hours
you work.
Bryan Robinson: There’s nothing wrong with long
hours. It’s not about long hours. It’s about
inability to turn it off, the obsession.
Cynthia McFadden: While we were there, Chad
Emrick never turned work off. From 4:00 in the
morning to 11:00 at night, the only
non-work we saw was a quick stop to buy
frozen food.
Chad Emrick: How are you tonight?
Cashier: Pretty good, how are you doing?
Chad Emrick: OK, thanks.
Cynthia McFadden: He had virtually no
interaction with people that was not work
related.
Robin Cohen: How could you not say a $50
million loss is a loss?
Cynthia McFadden: Robin Cohen, on the other
hand, while working very long hours, started
her day in an exercise class and ended it with
enough time left over for her husband.
Robin Cohen: How was your day?
Husband: Great.
Robin Cohen: I definitely work hard, but I think I
play hard. I think I do pursue things I want to
do outside of work.
Chad Emrick: I know that there are people who
put in an eight-hour day, and then they go
home and they watch television or tinker
around in the garage or do other things that
they enjoy doing. To me, I would be rather
bored by that.
Summit 1, Second Edition
Copyright © 2012 by Pearson Education, Inc. Permission granted to reproduce for classroom use.
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Bryan Robinson: He’s eliminated such huge
chunks of what makes life for most of us
important. He’s totally defining himself in terms
of his work.
Chad Emrick: There are a lot of things that people
do that enhance their lives in wonderful ways,
and I’m all for it. That’s just not the way that I
live my life.
Bryan Robinson: If this were alcohol and it were
this excessive, it would be clear to us, to
probably everyone watching, man, this guy’s
got a big problem. The woman, she seems more
balanced to me. She desires to have other things
in her life.
Cynthia McFadden: Do you take vacations?
Robin Cohen: Yeah, I do. I work really hard, and I
don’t feel bad about taking a vacation at all.
Bryan Robinson: Well, that’s the clincher.
Workaholics wouldn’t have taken that vacation
to begin with. Someone who’s really a serious
workaholic would have been terrified to take
that vacation.
Chad Emrick: The last time I took a vacation
where I didn’t have any work that I focused on
while I was on the vacation was in 1983. That’s
been a long time.
Cynthia McFadden: Are you thinking about
having children?
Robin Cohen: Yeah, we want to have children.
Cynthia McFadden: That’s why Robinson believes
even a hard-working, non-workaholic like
Robin Cohen needs to watch it if she ever does
have children, that she keeps the balance that
she now has. Can you keep doing it and have a
baby?
Robin Cohen: I think that I’ll probably have to cut
back.
Cynthia McFadden: Dr. Robinson agrees. But
cutting back is the one thing Chad Emrick has
never been able to do.
Bryan Robinson: The one thing I just want people
to know is that this is serious. It’s devastating—
not just for the workaholic—for the people
around them. It’s a devastating disorder.