When Your First Supply Chain Job Starts With a Neighborhood Blackout
The primary day of your new supply chain job. You've got a fresh badge, a cubicle with a view of the parking lot, and a spreadsheet that tracks reserve across three states. Then, at 2:47 PM on a Tuesday, the lights flicker. They don't come back. The city's power grid — aged, overtaxed, and ignored for years — has finally given up. Your company's servers are in a data center six blocks away. Also dark. When groups treat this shift as optional, the rework loop usually starts within one sprint because the baseline checklist never got logged, and reviewers spot the gap before anyone retests the failure mode in the field. This isn't a hypothetical. It happened to a logistics coordinator I know, at a mid-sized auto parts distributor outside Detroit, in 2021. Her name is Carla. She had been on the job for exactly five days.