Silent Noise

Chapter 2

Chapter 2

Jackson Whitman, a 42-year-old, and highly successful Logistics Manager has worked for the past eleven plus years at a very well-known fasteners company in Charlotte, NC. She holds nearly sixteen years total experience in the fastener industry and is deeply knowledgeable of the ends and outs of the intricate business.

Originally, when she first entered this field many years ago with her now competitor in the business General Fasteners, this was only supposed to be a steppingstone, a bridge until she found her way to her main goal.

Jackson held a B.S. in Biology which she obtained from years of hard work at North Carolina Central University, a historically black university in Durham, North Carolina. She had plans to get into the medical field well before now, but after graduation, life’s hustles and real-world experiences showed itself and proved that getting to her dream career would take some time and patience.

For the time being, Jackson grabbed a mediocre job that would serve as a means to paying a few bills, including her now due student loans while still having some spending money in her pockets until she got herself into the prestigious field of medicine.

After working for General Fasteners for a while, Jackson moved on to Millennium Fasteners, which unbeknownst to her, would be her home for next eleven plus years.

Initially, Jackson hated it there, she felt like she had traveled back in time due to the outdated work environment, which did not compare to the upscale, organized, and modern facility of the company she had just left.

Instead of the fleet of brand-new electric forklifts of any style and model imaginable, along with the organized, clean and functionable workstations that were all housed in the spotless, nearly 120,000 square foot building that she helped coordinate the relocation from the previous much smaller facility, Jackson was now back in a diminutive facility that lacked organization, leadership, and was sadly furnished with outdated workstations and lack of adequate equipment.

To Jackson’s dismay, personal and very primitive furnishings were scattered throughout the warehouse as well as outside the small brick building that belonged to the warehouse manager at the time, who used the facility for his own personal storage space rather than for incoming material. Even more disappointingly, the site only had one, old model, Nissan sit down propane forklift and a few sets of step ladders to get around.

Jackson could not wait to leave this place, each day she would call her mother to tell her about the ancient and dysfunctional world she had just entered and the chaos that surrounded it at the time. From the warehouse manager, who treated the facility like his garage to the branch manager, who stole money hand over fist from inappropriately scrapping material of the many valuable materials that entered the warehouse daily.

Jackson sat in awe at the number of times the branch manager with the help of the warehouse manager would come out to retrieve items that just arrived on the dock and relocate them into the old, metal scrap barrels box by box before driving them to the scrapping facility in the company van.

However, as a new employee, Jackson did not question their obvious thievery and went along with how she was told to remove the items out the system after they had been received.

The remaining employees, because of lack of care and leadership ran the place further into the ground due to their drinking on the job whether at their workstations or outside at the picnic table. Some, smoked m*******a with the branch manager, who stayed high on white girl or whatever he could seem to get his hands on.

The stories were non-stop, almost unbelievable and although deplorable and pathetic, the entertainment was endless. You could not stop watching even if you wanted to, it was like watching the disgraceful Trump administration at play each day at Millennium.

On one occasion Jackson was lost for words as she watched the police chase the facilities driver in the parking lot while in the company’s van. As it turned out, he had just committed a hit and run at a local convenient store, and the passenger, who was another employee, Jackson watched in awe as he almost got arrested being that he was high, drunk, and cursing the police officers.

Luckily for him, another employee, who did insides sales for the company was able to talk the officer out of arresting him as well as the driver. It would soon be found out that the company van was used for more than just making customer deliveries.

This place made up rules as they went and was all over the place in every aspect of the term. Jackson thought she had entered a fifth dimension on an episode of the Twilight Zone, and she wanted out and quick!

That though, would take much longer than ever expected. Although she was getting interviews and positive feedback from her job applications in the biological field, Jackson soon found out she was missing one major element that was needed in this area… experience.

And for Jackson, sadly, right now, no one was willing to give her the opportunity to get it. Unfortunately, she was going to have to make this unpleasant and unusual assignment work just a little longer, so she did what come naturally for her, she stuck with it and gave it 100%.

She learned to overlook the petty unpleasantries such as the look of the facility, the limited equipment, and the dysfunction as long as it did not interfere with her personally. Instead, she began to learn the ropes and gave this place a chance, after all, it was still a business.

As time passed, many changes were made, changes in management, personnel, structure, and Jackson’s opportunity for growth as she began to grow and excel within the company. Amazingly, in less than four years, Jackson had been promoted twice and was enjoying the new and improved Millennium Fasteners.

She had unexpectedly found a new admiration, respect and surprisingly, grew to love the world of fasteners, something she never knew anything about, or put any deep thought in.

Millennium taught her everything it was to know about this undercover and complex world. Her previous job had so many departments, schedules, deadlines, and people that she never actually learned about fasteners firsthand and on a more personal level.

Rather, she only learned how to process the abundance of customer products in the system and move them throughout the massive building as well as in and out of eighteen-wheelers.

Jackson soon found out how important and necessary nuts, bolts and screws really were and how much they existed and were needed in everyday life without ever realizing it before.

Some years later, Jackson, again due to her ambition, hunger to grow, her attention to work detail and great reputation with the powers to be in the company, landed herself in a new and more challenging role within the company.

Jackson, to the surprise of many at her branch had recently been promoted once again to an even bigger role that would relocate her to the New York branch, who needed help with several things.

Jackson’s role was going to be huge and incredibly challenging being that things had been allowed to get out of hand over many years, so bringing her sister branch back to normalcy would be difficult and would require lots of time and patience.

Jackson, being who she was expected a challenge and was more thrilled with the challenge rather than the extra income that came along with the new and exciting role.

What she was not expecting was the same dysfunction she experienced so long ago when she first started with the company eleven years prior. A defectively ran organization that she had finally overcome after many years. Unfortunately, and unbeknownst to Jackson, the dysfunction at her new branch was going to be on an entirely new level than she ever knew existed.

It would be later when she arrived at her new assignment that Jackson would realize that what she thought were shared goals with Brenda, her new branch manager, and the ideas that sold her to accept the position and relocate to New York while interviewing with Brenda four months earlier were not at all the truth. Sadly, Jackson had uprooted her life all based on an intentional lie.

Her role would not be anywhere near what it was explained to her to be, which would cause Jackson to raise the questions of, is the grass really greener on the other side? And was this new dream promotion going to be worth her time and energy after all.

The company that Jackson had grown to love, and trust had now raised suspicion. True colors were beginning to surface, mainly from the higher-ups, due to how things were mishandled during her relocation process, which the CFO refused to make right.

That along with the lack of support given to her when severe problems arose that pertained to Brenda even while corporate had knowledge of the flawed environment and the abusive management style that exist within the facility infuriated Jackson. How could she had been so blind?

Out of everything that Jackson had endured with the company over the years, this would be the catalyst that would finally end the eleven-year relationship. For Jackson, she would not sacrifice her voice, dignity, and happiness on the tail of lies, discrimination, disrespect, betrayal and being treated less than human just to get her to a more prominent position and into a new and more lucrative income bracket.