Consulting Pride and Prejudice

By Malini

Chapter 1

Posted on Monday, 3 June 2002

It is a fact universally acknowledged that an Ivy League student in possession of a high GPA and having vague corporate ambitions must be absorbed into the prestigious echelons of investment banking or management consulting. This fact is so entrenched in the minds of the graduating seniors and their parents that they consider any firm coming to recruit on campus the rightful property of one or another of their number.

Mrs. Bennet, an Ivy League parent twice over, with her eldest having graduated from Cornell and her second currently a senior at Princeton, was reading an e-mail from the latter one morning in her husband's study when her delighted shriek attracted his attention.

"Lizzy got called back for final rounds with MCC on Monday!"

"Indeed, my dear? And how is this any different from the numerous interviews and second rounds she's been sacrificing her classes for over the last four weeks?"

"Oh, you do delight in vexing me! You must know that MCC is one of the "big three" strategy consulting firms; they send more than half their analyst class to Harvard Business School every year and most of the rest to Wharton! And there'll be plenty of time for classes once she's secure about a good job for next year."

"I'm not so sure this is really what Lizzy wants to do fresh out of college. With this whole recruiting thing she hasn't applied to any graduate programs or even taken her GREs, and she doesn't really know what she's getting into. It's not like she's had much internship experience either."

"This is exactly the way you acted over Jane, and look what happened to her. Instead of getting a solid job at Microsoft as she was perfectly capable of doing with her degree in computer science, she's working towards a Ph.D. in cognitive science and robotics after which she'll be over-qualified for any reasonable job and will have an impossible time finding a tenure track position in a university."

"Jane knows what she wants to do. She's happy with it. That's exactly what I want for Lizzy. She doesn't know the first thing about consulting. No wonder she's been having a hard time interviewing!"

"How long will Jane be happy with what she's doing? Once she's finished her degree she'll be shunted around from university to university as a post-doc, and it doesn't help that with her interdisciplinary specialization, they won't know where to put her. You know what Lizzy wants, but we just can't afford to send her to law school with the other girls at her heels. She'll have to make it on her own, and the smartest thing for her is to get the best job available so that she can gain some useful work experience, and save money as quickly as possible. Now, I don't think investment banking is really her thing, but consulting is just the sort of problem solving challenge that she's bound to enjoy. And from what I've heard about the intellectual culture at MCC, it's the perfect place for her."

"It's amazing. I can hardly tell your voice apart from those brochures from the MCC info session that Lizzy sent home the other day."

"I may not have had the benefit of an Ivy League education like your daughters, but I managed to get them where they are today. It wasn't you who pored over their college application essays four years ago, and it wasn't you who did mock interviews with Lizzy over winter break. Don't tell me I don't know what's good for her."

"I'll never attempt to deny, my dear, that you know what's good for the girls. I just want them to find out on their own."

"They're my children. I can't see them suffer for the mistakes they'll make trying to figure things out on their own if I don't help them."

The author of the e-mail that had prompted this discussion had herself given a great deal of thought to the subject under contention. Elizabeth Bennet, having newly turned twenty-one, was preparing to graduate from Princeton with a major in history, and was working, when she could spare the time for it, on a thesis about the contribution of St. Augustine to the European intellectual tradition. She had accomplished this in the face of tremendous opposition from her mother, who had assumed that the acknowledged high school science geek would major in engineering, and had been more than a little surprised when at the High School prize ceremony when her daughter had carried away along with the anticipated mathematics and chemistry prizes the social studies prize as well. By this time it was well known that her high school had produced in her only the second student ever to be admitted to an Ivy League university, the first having been her elder sister Jane, who had gone to Cornell two years earlier. Elizabeth, by all accounts the more brilliant student of the two, was less known for her tractability, and having come home from Princeton after freshman fall after a disappointing experience in her oversized intro physics class, she had announced her intention of switching over to the major she was now on the verge of completing. Her mother, always given to extravagance of expression, had lamented that she was willfully ruining all prospects of a future career by choosing such an impractical subject.

Elizabeth might well have opted to follow her sister's footsteps into the higher echelons of the academia, but she was practical enough to realize that such a scheme would not necessarily answer her more worldly ambitions, which she had not forsaken. The law school plan did have considerable appeal for her, but perhaps the more so since financial considerations made it an immediate impossibility. She appreciated the luxury of time to consider where it was that she really wanted to end up in life. In the meantime the problem had remained of how she might most profitably fill the intervening years before she firmly decided one way or another, and Elizabeth would have had to be far more oblivious to the goings-on around her not to have known what the most practicable solution was. Year after year prestigious investment banks and management consulting firms came to Princeton as they did to other elite universities, and year after year some of the brightest students were absorbed into these ranks, often coming back subsequently as recruiters and praising their own firms to the hilt. It was rare in other professions for fresh college graduates to be entrusted with so much responsibility, and it seemed like the perfect opportunity for an ambitious young person to leave her mark on the world.

Elizabeth, who entertained few false illusions, had calculated her chances as carefully as she could. Her GPA was high enough to do any consulting firm proud, and was certainly adequate for investment banking, where grades were in any case less of a consideration. Her major in a humanities subject was not optimal, but she had enough math and science classes to establish that the quantitative requirements of the job would be well within her reach. Though she was almost ashamed to consider matters from this perspective, she had to acknowledge that with firms trying hard to secure a favourable gender balance, her sex was a definite point in her favor. And her open and amiable personality made her a good interview prospect, despite the fact that having spent her summers as a camp counselor, she had no internship experience. Her camp job, as well as the positions she had held part-time during the school year she had represented in the best possible light in her resume and her cover letters, stressing the team work and personal skills they had required.

Although Elizabeth was still without an offer, she been called for interviews by a sizeable percentage of the firms to which she had applied, and she was usually making it beyond the first round, which was typically conducted on campus. It was not yet very late in the recruiting race, and she had gained valuable experience and feedback from her early interviews. Just last Saturday she had made it into final rounds at a top Wall Street investment bank before getting her ding, as rejections are termed in recruiting parlance. She had called back several of her interviewers, and they had all acknowledged that she had had a very strong shot at the job, and they encouraged her to exude more enthusiasm at the prospect. As it happened Elizabeth had had little enthusiasm to exude at the prospect of an analyst position at an I-bank, which would have required an ninety-hour workweek at a conservative estimate.

But with management consulting it was different. Elizabeth had an idea that the work would suit her very well. Certainly she loved traveling, and there were few jobs that would give her such a good chance at that. She was an excellent team player, and would be able to work well in the case team environment. She thrived on intellectual stimulation and variety, and a job where she would move from firm to firm and industry to industry was infinitely preferable to getting stuck in a rut. She had always preferred Boston, where many top consulting firms were headquartered, to New York City. If the bonuses in consulting were not on the scale of investment banks, they were still considerable. And Elizabeth had to admit that she liked the taste of the professional world she had gotten in her elegant new suit, the five-star hotels at which she had been put up by the various firms, and the well appointed conference rooms where she had undertaken the uphill task of convincing her interviewers that her interest in St. Augustine was motivated by her underlying fascination with the world of business.

All in all, she was fairly confident she would enjoy the job that would give her the taste of the working world she needed before deciding once and for all between an academic and a professional career. Now all she needed to do was to land the job. She had spent the weekend going over case questions, which were a crucial part of consulting interviews, and which consisted of a real life consulting scenario in which she would have to play the role of a consultant, making recommendations based on the limited information available to her. She also flipped through her notes on Economics 101 just in case she was weak on some of the basics. For the personality interview, she had already honed most of her answers through the trial by fire of the earlier interviews, and had finally nailed the perfect answer to that inevitable question about her greatest weakness, which by the logic of interviewing had necessarily to be a hidden strength.

By the time she was done she was ready to conquer the world, and landing at Logan airport on Monday morning in her crisp navy suit, she looked it. She never faltered through the four hours of interviews with consultants at every conceivable level, and at lunch at a celebrated Boston seafood restaurant, she made a considerable impression on the senior partner seated beside her. Strolling down Newbury Street that evening, she was already mentally beginning to pick out furnishings for her projected apartment. By the time she returned to the hotel, there had already been one message for her, and the partner called again within minutes of her returning to her room. Returning to Princeton for classes the following morning, she knew already that she would be coming back in two weeks for Super Saturday, when she would be able to relax, and it would be their turn to sell the firm to her. And before the formal offer letter was even put in the mail, Mrs. Bennet's neighbors had already heard that her precocious Princetonian would be starting as a consultant at the Massachusetts Consulting Company after her graduation.

Chapter 2

Posted on Monday, 3 June 2002

William Darcy pulled into the spot marked CEO, Excent Technologies. He got out of the car and looked around in satisfaction. The logo of his company looked striking on the squat glass cube of the building, and the floor that he had leased would be a far better home for his fledgling company than the dorm-room where he had started it, the garage and spare bedroom at his parents' house that he had later invaded, and even the three-room office suite out of which they had operated for the last few months. He could envision them in years to come commissioning an entire office building of their own, but he was more than proud of their progression to date. In an economy where tech stocks were soaring and new startups were mushrooming every day, any new pre-IPO enterprise was a cause for at least cautious optimism, and with a product that had already begun to capture a healthy market share and that, unlike so many portals gone public, was already generating real revenue, Excent had better odds than most of survival. As founder and CEO, William Darcy was already a rich man, and when his company went public in a few months, he was likely to become a paper billionaire. Darcy had planned for this event to coincide with his twenty-fifth birthday.

As he walked past the short row of cars that had better parking spots than his own, Darcy barely noticed how out of place the boxy late eighties Volvo he had driven since high school was among the luxury fleet of the other presidents and CEOs whose offices were located in the building. He walked into the building, paused for a few minutes to chat with the receptionist, and took the stairs instead of waiting for the elevator. Had she not remembered his friendly manners and open smile, she might well have questioned his credentials and his business in the building. It was not every CEO who came into the office in shorts, a flannel shirt, and tevas.

Darcy spent a few minutes admiring the wooded greenery of Reston from his window. He was more than happy with his choice of office location. His sister had been disappointed that he had chosen a suburban location - the young high schooler had visions of her entrepreneur brother ruling the roost in a posh down-town Washington DC office, or at least in Crystal City, but Darcy himself much preferred the picturesque environs of the suburb where they had grown up. Besides, the rents were more affordable here, the amenities were unparalleled, and Reston had already gained quite a reputation for being a center of technology on the east coast. No, a downtown office, much as it might have appealed to Georgiana's aesthetic sensibilities, was hardly the right place for a company like his. He planted himself in his ergonomic chair, and reached for the phone as he heard a knock on the door.

"Hey, Will. You ready to have that talk?"

"Yes, come on in, guys. I was just about to call you."

The guys were Sean Fitzwilliam and Caroline Bingley, the other two members of the so-called triumvirate that had collectively founded and now run Excent. Caroline and William had been contemporaries at CalTech - she had stayed to finish her major in computer science after he dropped out, realizing despite Richard Feynman and Murray Gell-Mann that he did not want an academic career in physics. He had moved back from Pasadena to DC, where Caroline had joined him a year later. Sean was a few years older, and he had spent a few years at Microsoft after college before joining his cousin and Caroline in their start-up. Sean and Caroline were brilliant coders, while William, who had the most theoretical bent of the three, was merely competent. But the basic idea behind Excent's flagship product had been a brainwave of William's, and the other two, who were chiefly responsible for its execution, were always ready to give him credit. Now of course Excent was far more than a three-person operation, but Ian and Caroline were still actively involved in the actual programming aspects, and had happily allowed the management responsibilities to fall on William.

"What was it you wanted to talk about? Did Caroline tell you about the trouble she was having with the source code for the...?

"Will you drop it, Sean? You're always trying to make me look stupid in front of everybody."

"Guys, calm down. I have no idea what you're talking about."

"Since Caroline doesn't want to tell you, let me enlighten you on our newest beta-product..."

"Since Caroline doesn't want to tell me, it's obviously not such a big deal. If you must give her a hard time do it on your own time. There's something I need to talk to you guys about."

"What's on your mind, Will?"

"It's actually something I've been thinking about for some time now. We're growing incredibly fast and we have a pretty healthy cash flow. We've only existed for about three years and already there are so many companies competing with us in what was virtually an unexploited niche when we started out. But we aren't growing anywhere near as fast as the market is. And the moment someone else comes out with a better technology it's all over for us."

"Of course not. If it's R&D you're worried about Ian and I have that nicely under control. You should see some of the ideas we have for our next release. You should really get more involved. We could use your help."

"I would love to get more involved. That's why we started this company. But lately all I seem to be doing is bookkeeping, and following up on legalese, and all these odds and ends that seem to go along with running a company. I've been playing catch-up on econ and finance and all the stuff I didn't care about in college, and I'm beginning to come to the conclusion that me staying up nights reading management textbooks is not the right way to be running this company."

"You've been reading management textbooks? I can't believe they get away with making an entire academic discipline out of common sense!"

"Common sense it may be, but it's common sense about stuff we know nothing about. We're a company based on one product, and we sink or swim with it. We've been doing well so far because it's a good product, and people need it. But as a company, we don't really have a vision; we don't know where we want to go, and we don't have a clue how to do business in the real world."

"Are you saying that we're in some kind of financial trouble, Will?"

"No, Sean, we're flourishing. I just want to keep it that way."

"So do you know what you want to do about it?"

"Yes, actually. I think we need to bring in a strategy firm to help us figure these things out. I'm going to ask a few firms to submit bids, and I need you guys to okay the expenditure."

"Do you really think it's worth it, Will? I mean, you know these consulting firms. They're just a bunch of twenty-somethings making this stuff up as they go along."

"Caroline, we're just a bunch of twenty-somethings making this stuff up as we go along, and we've done pretty well for ourselves. They're going to know a whole lot more about business than we do, plus it's always healthy to have an outside perspective. I think it's worth seeing what they have to say."

"Will, you know we trust you with all this stuff. If you think it's a good idea, go for it. We'll be more than happy to cooperate with whomever you bring in."

"Alright, thanks, guys. I do think it's a good idea."

Sean and Caroline headed back to their own offices, their minds already straying to the new software product they were working on. Darcy turned back to his computer screen, looking at the initial responses he had already received. Looking at the offers he made a mental shortlist of the ones he would invite back for a more extensive pitch. Even at this stage there was something particularly attractive about one of the bids, and after going through all the meetings and presentations he was comfortable with his final choice. MCC would be coming in to consult at Excent Technologies.

"So, Elizabeth, you're up for allocation on your other fifty percent again? What cases have they offered you?"

Elizabeth looked up from her laptop and turned around as her office-mate started speaking. Charlotte Lucas was a third-year consultant at MCC, and the two of them were reasonably good friends despite the tendency of analyst consultants to socialize within their classes. Many of Elizabeth's good friends were first years like her, at MCC or other Boston-area consulting firms, but thanks to Charlotte she had met quite a few people from other years as well.

"Well, there's the accounting piece for a pharmaceuticals company, but I did accounting on my last case, and I'd like to try something a little different this time. The other one they offered me is a B-to-B pre-IPO internet start-up. Sounds kind of neat. I think that's the one I'll take."

"I still think it's funny that they call these firms pre-IPO. There's nothing predetermined about going public. In the good old days being privately owned was a good thing. Come to think of it, we're privately owned."

"Come, Charlotte. I think you're just jealous. You can go tell your friends that you work at a pre-IPO consulting firm if it'll make you feel any better."

"So much of our business is coming from these tech firms nowadays. I've heard estimates of up to 70% of new cases. And we are definitely oversold. Otherwise there's no way a first year like you would have been double-staffed within six weeks of joining."

"Well, I like the double-staffing model. It keeps me from getting bored or obsessed. And so far, my peaks haven't ever coincided."

"Oh, they will. You've been here what, four months? That's not even long enough for the glamour of traveling to fade!"

"You'll never convince me that weekly trips aren't glamourous. I'm already looking forward to DC."

"You won't be saying that when you're stuck for hours in Dulles airport, or better yet, in some hub through which you'll be routed, waiting for the snowdrifts at Logan to be cleared."

"Oh, hush! As if you didn't take this job to be the chick on the planes!"

"I took this job as a way to escape to the glamourous east coast, and now look at me. I don't think I've had a single case that hasn't been in the corn-belt I was running away from."

"Well, maybe you'll get lucky and get pulled in on this one. You're coming close to the end of one of your cases too, right?"

"I should be so lucky! What's the company called, anyway?"

"Excent. Dot-com, I need hardly add. I was reading about it in PC World the other day. It was started by this guy who dropped out of physics at CalTech a few years ago."

"A drop-out physics major? A man after your own heart then!"

"Hardly! I didn't exactly get disillusioned and light out into the territories. I switched gears into history."

"Undergrad thesis in history, multi-million dollar corporation. It's a toss-up, I'd say."

"Thanks for making me feel like I wasted my life by staying in school and landing an entry level job at which I make almost twice the national median household income."

"I aim to please."

Notes:

Consulting-speak and other things that might be worth clarifying but are just as likely to be self-explanatory:

Analyst consultant: In consulting and investment banking, undergrad hires typically come in for about three years or less, and are often called analysts. Graduate hires (typically business school), or the people who stay on beyond three years or so, are called associates. (This is all much more clear-cut in investment banking. In consulting there are some firms where the entry-level position is called associate; then there are those where everyone's called a consultant, and there are no titles to tell you how senior people are.) Whether people are basically shunted out after two years or whether they are encouraged to stay depends on the culture of the firm.

Case: sometimes called project. Basically, this is the unit in which consulting work is sold. As of now, MCC has been hired for one case at Excent, although its scope has not been clearly delimited. Based on their findings they may be re-hired for subsequent cases, which is not uncommon. Clients with whom consulting firms have a lot of ongoing business become relationship clients.

Allocations, 50%, and double-staffing: Depending on the firm, junior level consultants work on either one or two cases at a time - they are either single or double-staffed. My make-believe firm, MCC, is on the double-staffing model, and one of Elizabeth's cases just ended, so that she is up for 50% allocation on a new case. Consultants do have some choice in the case on which they are staffed, but their choices are often fairly limited, and often they are just shunted into whatever's open. There is some attention paid to the trajectory of their careers, and firms typically have some sort of a personal development model in which they have to rotate through various different roles in their first two years. After that people usually have some control about whether or not they might want to specialize in a particular area or remain as a generalist. But all this averages out over a few years. At any given point, a consultant may just have to suck it up and take whatever's thrown at him or her.

R&D: Research and Development

IPO: Initial Public Offering

B-to-B: Business to Business. The more profitable model of e-commerce (as compared to the more glamourous B-to-C, which is business to consumer).

Chapter 3

Posted on Monday, 3 June 2002

William Darcy was not a man known for his adherence to ritual, yet the receptionist with whom he never failed to exchange a few friendly words before heading up to his office was more than a little surprised to see him join the little crowd waiting for the elevator rather than taking the stairs in threes as he was wont to do. That the reason for this deviation from his routine might have been the addition to the usual crowd of middle-aged slightly over-weight middle managers of a young lady in a crisp navy suit never occurred to that unsuspecting woman. Had she stopped to think about it she would probably have reflected that she was hardly likely to be his type. And the fact that he never attempted to exchange a word with her, while she apparently devoted more of her attention to the overpriced coffee product with an over-elaborate quasi-Italian name than she cared to bestow upon him, would have seemed, on the whole, to vindicate that good lady's judgment.

And yet, as it happened, she was mistaken. For William was piqued at the appearance of the young lady. He would have scorned the charge of having fallen in love at first sight, and though young men are notoriously dense as to the state of their feelings, in this case he would have been right. William was not in love, nor was he even interested enough to initiate introductions. But he was curious enough to wonder where she might be working. For indeed, by her manner of dress, she might have been employed at any of the various corporations housed in that building excepting his own. It was true that hitherto none of them had ever demonstrated the good judgment of procuring an employee who had left any sort of an impression on him. The women William had encountered so far in the building seemed to favor the polyester power suits in unbecomingly bright colors that were such a DC staple, and it didn't help that their outerwear and shoes were usually of the casual sort that could never properly complete such an ensemble. William had never understood the appeal of sneakers with suits - he understood that these women usually changed out of them at their offices, but he never encountered them there, and he did not think DC weather justified the necessity for super-sensible footwear. He was particularly impressed by this young lady's smart but sensible footwear, although it did occur to him that he couldn't recall ever having paid particular attention to an attractive woman's shoes before. But William was an optimist at heart, and now that his hopes had been justified, he felt a sort of proprietary interest in this young lady and her employer.

Elizabeth was suffering from fewer misapprehensions. The receptionist had been mistaken in imagining all her attention occupied by her caffeinated beverage, for its stimulating kick had had its anticipated effect in shaking off the morning stupor which was a legacy of her four years in college, and she was covertly attentive to her new surroundings. Though she had not recognized William from the one outdated picture she had seen, she was well aware that he could only have been under the employ of one firm housed in that building. Looking at his mode of dress, she wondered again if she should have worn something a little more casual. As an outside consultant she could hardly dress down to the extent that the employees of Excent seemed to, but she had acquired an extensive wardrobe of the business casual attire she usually sported in Boston, and in which she might have been a little less out of place here. With a determined effort she cast these doubts out of her mind. It was, after all, her first visit to the offices of Excent, and she was determined to represent her firm in the best and most professional light. There would be plenty of opportunities to dress down later, when she had gotten to know the lay of the land. On this occasion, too, she had already secured an appointment with Sean Fitzwilliam, one of the founders of Excent, and was hoping to get some time with Will Darcy himself. Besides, she had always meant to conquer the world in this suit.

Sneaking another look at the young man, she wondered whether all tech geeks really needed to dress in these incredibly boring clothes that seemed to be the badge of their tribe. He was far from unattractive, with striking features, a complexion that was perhaps just a little too pale, and a tangle of slightly unruly dark brown hair, but his clothes hardly showed him to his best advantage. He was wearing cargo shorts of a sort of dirty khaki color, which, though they revealed a pair of well-formed legs, were hardly flattering. For his feet he had gone for the socks-and-teva combination that Elizabeth had never understood. Surely if you needed the socks to keep you warm it was time to wear real shoes instead. His white T-shirt seemed as though it might have been snug enough to show off a lean lightly muscled frame, but the un-ironed flannel shirt hanging over it effectively blocked the view and cancelled whatever points he might have scored with the t-shirt. So much wasted potential - in a well-cut dark suit, this guy would have caught any woman's attention. Elizabeth understood that formals weren't the thing for everybody all the time, but hadn't this guy heard of urban grunge? In low-slung dark jeans and a snug sweater - olive green, maybe, or charcoal gray, with grungy hiking boots to complete the ensemble, and maybe he could even pull off the spiky hair look - that would be a picture any girl would want.

Startled though he was that she alighted on his floor, William had not lost command of his manners entirely, and he courteously held the door open for her before heading towards the coffee machine for his far less expensive caffeine jolt, wondering all the while which of his employees might be expecting such a visitor at this hour. Although he had spoken to Rajat, the team leader from MCC, only the day before, he had momentarily forgotten that the other consultants from the firm might also have work on the premises, and that he had designated the spare conference room for them to camp out in.

Elizabeth smiled her thanks at the guy, mildly impressed that a techie should have the manners to hold the door open for her, and reminded herself that she was here with a real job to do that did not involve rewriting the dress code at Excent, however unfortunate it might be. As she headed towards the conference room, she made a point of noting where Sean Fitzwilliam's office was, so that she would be able to find it when she came to talk to him in half an hour. It was right next door to that of William Darcy, she noticed, wondering idly whether or not he was in yet, and when she might be able to meet him.

She picked a convenient spot for herself on the conference table and booted up her laptop waiting for the other MCC consultants to come in. She knew Megan would be here, at least, but she wasn't sure about some of the others, with whom she wasn't working as closely. Megan was a third-year; she was managing Elizabeth on this particular case, and the two had built up a good rapport in working closely together. It was under Megan's guidance that Elizabeth had been working on competitor analyses for the last three weeks, and the two of them had put together a considerable document which Megan and Rajat, the team leader, had presented to Will Darcy and his executive team, consisting of Sean Fitzwilliam and Caroline Bingley, a few days earlier.

On the whole the presentation had gone over fairly well, but Caroline Bingley had apparently been unimpressed by the level of detail that they had been able to go into. When Will had hired MCC it had been the height of the tech boom and the company had had plenty of money to spare. Now, a little over a month later, things were just starting to look a little tight. Will had been forced to defer the IPO on the advice of their bankers, a lot of their competitors were slashing jobs and paring down expenses, and quite a few had already gone under. Under these circumstances Caroline took the view that the rather expensive consulting firm Will had brought in was an unnecessary drain on their cash flow. She did not believe that the outsiders understood their product or their business, and did not believe that a generalized solution would help Excent.

Rajat was normally very good at managing client expectations, but he sensed that Caroline would remain resistant to whatever findings MCC was able to report. He did intend to be careful that her explicitly voiced criticisms be addressed to whatever extent possible. He had briefed Elizabeth and Megan on his take on the situation, and Elizabeth had come down to DC today specifically to interview some of the people in various capacities here at Excent to get a better sense of how their day-to-day business did work. First on her list was Sean Fitzwilliam, one of the heads of R&D, as well as the COO to the extent that the company had one at all. Rajat had recommended Sean over Caroline, since he had been far more cooperative at the meetings so far, and he had been very pleasant over the telephone, giving her as much time as she needed. Then she would speak to some of the program managers and actual coders, as well as some people on the marketing end. Tomorrow she had managed to schedule fifteen minutes with the dread Caroline herself, but both Rajat and Megan had warned her not to expect too much productive information from that interview.

Elizabeth looked at Megan as she came in soon afterwards and groaned inwardly. She had known she would be overdressed, but looking at the other girl she realized how much. In Boston, Megan sported an extremely sharp wardrobe compared to the firm in general. Here she had come in wearing a pair of khaki Capri pants, and a smart but casual fitted white patterned shirt. It was a good look on her, but not the sort of thing she would ever have worn into their office except perhaps on weekends. Megan, obviously, was thinking along the same lines.

"Nice suit, Elizabeth, but I'm surprised you thought it was necessary here!"

"Well, you know, first visit to client site and all that. I'm always scared of getting it wrong, so I just thought I'd go all out and knock their socks off, but I'm beginning to think I might just scare them."

"Who knows, it might work. Not that I expect Will Darcy and his cronies to know too much about a good Italian cut, but it does leave an impression. Good thing you're not seeing Caroline today, though. It would definitely rub her the wrong way."

"I need to meet this dragon lady. Why are you all so scared of her?"

"She's hardly a dragon lady - the opposite, actually. She can be quite nice, and I get the sense that the employees love her. She's just the type of woman who never notices what she's wearing herself, and tends to assume that women who dress well are ditzes."

"So I should show up tomorrow in my thrift-shop best, and that'll win her over?"

"I doubt you or I are capable of dressing down to the extent that would satisfy her. We'll just have to find other ways to prove that brains are a part of the package. What's your agenda for today?"

"A bunch of interviews, starting with Sean Fitzwilliam."

"You'll like Sean. He's a fun guy, and he's been really helpful. That's a good place to start, but you should let him know that may need to go back to him later. He's the person I'd run things by for confirmation."

"And what are you up to?"

"Rajat asked for some economics slides for the industry deck. I'll be crunching some numbers on that. We can discuss them in the afternoon and see what we can fill in."

"I should probably head on over. I'll see you when I get back."

She headed over to where Sean's office was located, and paused at the open door, knocking gently, and then entered. The desk was vacant, and Elizabeth was momentarily nonplused, when she noticed someone standing by the window. The flannel shirt looked familiar, and when he turned around she realized that it was the guy she had encountered on the elevator. Wishing she had introduced herself at the time, she wondered once again why it was that tech-geeks needed to dress so uniformly that one never had any idea of their standing.

William, for his part, was simply staring. He had stopped by his cousin's office with a small question and hadn't realized that Sean was expecting anybody. He certainly could not fathom why this woman would be in his cousin's office at ten in the morning. It was true that somehow Sean did manage to get a lot more dates with a more eclectic group of people than either he or Caroline did, but why this gorgeous creature would be meeting him in the morning on a working day was beyond his comprehension. Idly, he wondered what had happened to the laptop he had been sure she was carrying earlier, and, for that matter, where she had been for the last half-hour or so if she was only meeting Sean now. He gathered himself as she started to speak, not wanting to come off as a tongue-tied wreck.

"Hello, I'm Elizabeth Bennet. We spoke on the phone yesterday."

"We did?"

William knew he sounded like an idiot, but he was more than certain that no female friend of his cousin's had called him the previous day, or ever in his life, for that matter. He wondered if what he could say that might make him come off as a reasonably sane person in this conversation. Elizabeth was feeling rather flustered herself. She could see his embarrassment, but was hardly disposed to sympathize with it given that he had essentially said that he had no idea who she was. Why couldn't these techies keep calendars like normal people? There was no reason for Sean Fitzwilliam to particularly remember her - it was not as though they had had a very memorable conversation - but surely he could be expected to remember an appointment that she had confirmed only the previous day.

"This is Sean Fitzwilliam's office, right? He asked me to come by..."

"Oh, you're looking for my cousin. I'm sorry; he must have stepped out for a minute. I was waiting for him myself."

"I'm sorry, I just assumed you were Sean."

"No, it's a natural assumption. This is his office."

"Then why didn't you just tell me you weren't Sean?"

"I assumed, since you were in his office, that you knew him already."

Elizabeth smiled. He still looked rather flustered, and she couldn't help needling him just a little.

"Do people always meet face to face in your world?"

"I guess not, nowadays. I'm sorry."

William still felt like he was coming off as an idiot, but that could hardly be helped, given that he was feeling like one. He didn't consider himself a dense person by any means, but he didn't quite understand what this beautiful stranger was here for. Had Sean been having some kind of a cyber-affair? It wasn't totally impossible; his cousin probably likely to be braver than he in that regard, but it was still unlikely that he would want to meet someone he met that way here at the office. Maybe he was interviewing her for a job or something; he certainly wasn't really keeping tabs on hiring, and it was quite possible that they needed someone on the R&D side of things. William had never really met a coder who dressed like this woman did, but he supposed it wasn't impossible. He followed up that line of thought with a question, and then hesitated, feeling a little intrusive.

"So are you a programmer as well, then?"

Elizabeth by now was really rather curious about this mysterious cousin of Sean Fitzwilliam's. He was obviously an employee here at Excent himself, and as such, he must have known that she was one of the consultants. It was hardly likely that there were too many other groups of strangers roaming around the office. It occurred to her that this was probably the Caroline Bingley mentality, that one couldn't say anything productive about a computer company without knowing all about computing. Elizabeth herself, like many consultants, had at various points nursed doubts about the utility of her contribution as a consultant, but she felt a little uncomfortable when it was someone else, and especially a client employee, was the one to question it. Her answer was honest, if a little defensive.

"I have done some programming. I didn't major in it or anything but I know my way around a computer."

William was a little surprised at her answer, but rather pleased that she didn't contradict him outright. Surely if she were here on a personal visit she would have made that clear. He felt a little less of an idiot, but he wasn't actually sure if his relief stemmed mainly from not having made a complete fool of himself again or from the fact that she probably wasn't some cyber-conquest of his cousin's. If she would be working here, it might be nice to get to know her. He didn't know if anything would come of it but at least she looked more interesting than the girls he usually saw around here.

"Well, we're not all programmers per se. I'm sure you know basically how we work around here."

"Actually, I was hoping to get a clearer sense of that. It's one of the reasons I wanted to talk to Sean."

"Yeah, Sean's probably the right person to talk to. He keeps an eye on almost everything going on here on the technical side. Well look, I'll go take a look at what's keeping him. It was nice meeting you."

"It was nice meeting you too."

"I'll see you around. Take care."

With that he stepped out of the office in long casual strides. Elizabeth took a seat to wait for Sean, a little weirded-out by the encounter. She wasn't really surprised that Sean wasn't here yet, since she had come by about five minutes early, but she wasn't quite sure what to make of this cousin of his. He seemed like a harmless relatively nice guy, but she got the sense he didn't really know what to make of her presence at Excent, and somehow that thought bothered her. While she had her moments of doubt about her profession, on the whole she did believe that consultants, with their outside perspective, had something to contribute to the way that a business was run. Although as a first-year she had not been exposed to high-level client presentations, she was not naďve, and she realized that a certain degree of resistance was to be expected, if only to foster a more engaging and ultimately more productive conversation. But never before had she faced any first-hand resistance, and even though this guy had hardly come out and grilled her on what she was doing there, even just his apparent cluelessness made her a slightly uncomfortable. She wondered who he was and what he did here. At a small office like this, it was actually quite likely that she'd run into him again. Perhaps it would actually make sense for her to talk to someone like him, so that both of them might have a better idea of what she was doing here as a consultant. But if so she would have to see about it later. For today she already had a full day ahead of her, and already Sean Fitzwilliam was a just a few minutes late.

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