Greg stammered, handing the badge back as if it burned his fingers. I don't care where it came from. The hazard pay is reinstated. Effective at midnight, retroactive for the last pay period. Second, the routing software.
It crashes because the server architecture on this side of the building hasn't been upgraded since 2018. Call it. Tell them they have until Friday to install the new fiber lines or I'll fire their department head. Greg swallowed hard. Yes, sir.
I And Greg? Abalardo leaned in slightly. If I find out you're shorting the forklift maintenance budget again to pad your efficiency numbers, you'll be boxing orders in sector 9 by Monday. Abalardo walked away, leaving Greg rooted to the concrete. For the next 3 weeks, Abalardo tore through the logistics division like a controlled burn.
He didn't sit in board meetings listening to PowerPoint presentations about synergy and macroeconomic headwinds. He sat in the break rooms. He drank the terrible burnt coffee. He talked to the shift supervisors who were actually trying to untangle the mess Leo Kinsley had created. He discovered that the company was bleeding money not because the workers were slow, but because the corporate structure had starved them of the tools they needed to be fast.
He authorized the purchase of new pallet jacks. He fired a regional manager who had been skimming off the overtime budget. He instituted a mandatory rest period for the long haul drivers, directly contradicting a 30-page memo written by a Yale graduate who had never driven a truck in his life. The push back from the executive floor was immediate and fierce. The old guard, the men and women who had supported Leo's attempted coup, tried to bury Abalardo in red tape.
They sent him endless emails filled with corporate jargon demanding risk assessments and quarterly projections. Abalardo ignored all of them. He forwarded the complaints to Chia, usually with a one-s sentence reply attached. Fixing the floor. Tell them to wait.
Chia, true to her word, acted as an impenetrable shield. When a furious board member stormed into her office demanding to know why a former data router was authorizing millions in structural upgrades, she simply handed them the efficiency reports. Under Abalardo's brutal common sense restructuring, sector 4's output had spiked 18% in a single month. The turnover rate had plummeted. They were winning.
But the real test was coming. December arrived with a vengeance. The weather reports had been predicting a massive front moving down from Canada. But when it hit, it paralyzed the entire coast. A blizzard of historic proportions slammed into the city, dropping 2 ft of snow in 8 hours and sending temperatures plunging below zero.
The city ground to a halt. The airports closed. The highways became graveyards of abandoned vehicles. At the Kinsley Bait Central Tower, the atmosphere was sheer panic. It was 2 weeks before Christmas.
The supply chain was running at maximum capacity and suddenly the arteries had frozen solid. Abalardo was in his office on the 55th floor, staring at a digital map of the eastern seabboard. The screen was a sea of red flashing lights. Hundreds of trucks were stranded. Three secondary distribution hubs had lost power.