Learning curves Read Online Free

okay?”
    “Of course. See you on Monday. And you’ve made the right decision, you know.”
    That was when Jen had put the phone down and realized the enormity of what she’d agreed to. The phone rang again, and she picked up quickly.
    “What now?” she demanded.
    “Okay, okay, don’t bite my head off. I just wanted to know what time you were planning to be at my place. Only I thought we were meeting half an hour ago . . .”
    It was Angel. Shit. They were meant to be going out to a glamorous new bar, and Jen hadn’t even started to get ready. She looked down at her jeans-clad self and jumped up.
    “Sorry, got caught up in something. You just won’t believe what . . . I’ll, um, be there soon. Give me twenty minutes?”
    “Jen twenty minutes or a normal twenty minutes? Only yours always last twice as long as anyone else’s . . .”
    Jen grinned ruefully. “I’ll be there as soon as I can, okay?”
    She ran into the bedroom and scanned her wardrobe for something to wear.
    I’m doing an MBA,
she thought to herself again as she pulled out and then rejected various T-shirts and shoes.
I’m actually doing an MBA at Bell Consulting.
    It already felt like a terrible mistake.

1
    Jen looked up at the large, gray building in front of her and tried to convince herself that she was doing the right thing.
    Somehow it had seemed easier when it was just a matter of telling her mother she’d do the MBA. She’d had visions of herself spying on board meetings, eavesdropping on conversations as she walked down long corridors, compiling a dossier of information and bringing the perpetrators and their heinous crimes to justice. In her mind she’d been the heroine of her own little film in which she (pretty much single-handedly) saved the world and got a thank-you letter from the Queen. Even Angel’s protestations that she had finally lost the plot completely hadn’t deterred her. In many ways, they’d made her feel more of a rebel, made the whole idea more appealing.
    And then she’d got the application form. She’d had to write essays, sit tests, and be interviewed by men in gray suits whom she’d had to convince that a career in business management was everything she’d ever dreamed of and more. But now she was actually about to walk right into the Bell Consulting offices and go to her first lecture. Somehow in her daydreams she’d skipped the bit where she actually had to do an MBA.
    It can’t be that hard, she told herself. Just boring. Like being back in a physics lesson at school. Or a Durkheim lecture at university. Jen had taken sociology for a term, thinking that she’d get an insight into people’s motivations, thinking that she’d unlock the key to human happiness, but instead she’d spent weeks learning why people commit suicide less often in wartime. Apparently it had gotten more interesting later on; those who stuck with the course kept telling her how great it was. But Jen couldn’t wait that long; she’d switched to philosophy and never looked back. Well, not until she’d had to endure lectures on Hegel, but by then it was too late to switch again.
    Anyway, she reminded herself, the point was that she just had to get into a role. Everyone here would think she was a perfectly normal MBA student; all she had to do was to go along with it. Pretend she found it interesting. She shuddered. She’d read the brochure cover to cover, and they were going to be learning about things like “business process reengineering” and “managing the bottom line.” It was too hideous to even bear.
    Still, at least she was doing something worthwhile. The truth was that she’d been kind of wondering where her life was going recently. She had started to feel just a little that she was just killing time at a desk at Green Futures and had even started wondering whether she’d been right to split up with Gavin. It was as if she wasn’t entirely sure if her place in the world was the one back in London, wasn’t