Tag: on call

On Call

Back in the olden days of this here blog I used to regularly complain about having to be on call for work. There were a bunch of different varieties of on call-ness and I didn’t enjoy any of them. They all stressed me out. The good part though is that they usually come with some form of compensation. That was something I could get behind, and that was why I took the on call shifts when they were available to me.

When I was promoted, almost 10 years ago, I made the decision to make the on call shifts available to my staff whenever possible. I wanted them to receive the compensation and I pledged to myself that I would only take shifts when my entire staff were unavailable. As it turns out, I haven’t had to take many on call shifts since. There was one where I was covering a customer’s catastrophic system failure and I knew I was going to be working around the clock for a whole weekend. I took that one to protect my staff. That was a, “the buck stops here” kinda thing. It was awful, but I handled it. Every other on call shift, and the pay/comp time/whatever compensation was involved went to them. I feel pretty good about that track record.

Well… looks like I am on call this weekend. Sort of. Not exactly, but close. I’ve been the go to contact for the last couple of weeks anyway. It just seems easier to have me be the off hours contact too.

Yeah… I’m starting to remember why I didn’t like being on call. Memories, am I right?

Could be a Fun Day

Last night after work I got a text asking if I could cover for a site that was dealing with a big system failure.  Sure, I said.  They were hoping to have users back on the system at 8:30.  Works for me.  By 10:30 my phone hadn’t rung so I was feeling optimistic.  I should have known better.  The phone rang at 1:30 this morning.  By 2:30 I was told I could go back to bed.  That was good then, but not now.  Some of my co-workers heroically worked through the night, but difficulties persist.  That leads to Robbie and his group having an interesting Friday.

Oh weekend, you are so close yet so far away.  So much stands between us.

Now What the Hell Do I Do?

So I volunteered for some on-call duty tonight. At first it wasn’t an off hours thing. At first it was just needing to validate some data before going home. The customer was running something that would wrap up around 5:00 or so.

When that plan fell through it turned into off hours coverage with everyone needing to log in probably between 8:00 and 9:00. Despite the “call” part of the word on-call, we were told to wait on an email. Right.

Well 8-9 turned into 11:00-12:00, which tuned into 1:30-2:00, which at 2:22 AM turned into we found another problem and now we don’t know when we’ll need you. Still, all of this communication is via email.

So I, being the literal dumb ass that I am, have been staying awake this whole time. If I’d just ignored the whole email communication concept and assumed they would call my cell phone when they need me, I could have gone to bed at a decent hour, but no. Not me. I stayed awake with the gmail app’s notification sound turned on and the volume on my cell phone cranked to make sure I can log in as soon as I’m needed. I’ve been sitting here like a schmuck watching Star Trek Voyager and Archer (the Burt Reynolds episode rules) on Netfix while I should have been sleeping like a normal, non-dumb-ass person! Now I’m probably going to have to take a vacation day or a sick day tomorrow because there is no way I’m functioning on this tiny amount of sleep.

Sonofa…

Unexpected On-Call

There are several flavors of on-call terror. Tonight is a new and special brand.

Tonight is the:

Unexpected On-Call!

Terrifying, eh? A customer had something come up today that requires a bunch of day staff be available after hours. It’s my customer so I took it.

No calls yet. Just one email sent to about 100 people.

May all of your phones be silent tonight, said one on-call guy to all of the others.

Happy Easter

Happy Easter to those of you who celebrate it.

There isn’t much celebrating going on here today. I’m on call until tomorrow morning, so we won’t be visiting family. The kids are at their dad’s house, so there won’t be any Easter Bunny shenanigans, although there are a couple of baskets of candy in the living room that weren’t there yesterday. Hmmm. They must be for me! Jen is going to cook a ham today, because she’s a wonderful person, but she is going to work too. I need to clean the mini van as we have a group of five going on a drive one day this week and the rear seats need to be put in. If I am doing that much, then I might as well clean out the whole pig sty. Other than that, maybe some hammy music to go with the ham dinner while I wait for my phone to not ring?

Happy Easter.

On Call

I’m on call as of 40 minutes ago. There are three on call scenarios. Lives, for when customers start using our software for real, updates for when customers who are already live take a new release, and off hours coverage for holidays and weekends where any customer who has a problem calls you. We get paid for updates and off hours, but we only get comp time for lives. Off hours is a living hell of pain and suffering. See most of my entries from January 1, 2013 for more. Lives almost never result in calls. We are there if we are needed, but we are rarely if ever needed. Updates are a relatively new thing for us. They are a shorter time span and they almost never result in calls.

I’m on update coverage starting at 10:00am Eastern time today, through start of business at 9:00am tomorrow. While the updates I’ve covered have generally been quiet and easy for me, the one exception was a very large customer in Canada who had a really rough go of their last update.

Guess who I’m covering today. Go on, guess…

Lets hope this time goes better for them, and me, than last time. Fingers crossed.

D’OH!!!

What the…

Why is it that I only get wrong numbers calling me when I’m on call?

Changing the subject, the Bruins blew a 3-0 first period lead tonight. Lets hope they can cash in on this late third period power play to regain the lead.

Go Bruins!

On Call Update #4

13 minutes left.

My phone did not ring since my last post.  I was able to sleep, all though not very well.  Being on call tends to make me nervous.  I usually fall asleep, but I end up waking up a number of times through the night.  At least I didn’t have to work through the night.  I am very thankful for that.

On a normal day I would have left for work half an hour ago.  Today I am supposed to be available until 8:30, so I have to go in to work late.  Makes sense.

I have the mini van today and the leaky tire is almost empty.  I have to go fill it before I do anything.  Maybe we should get one of those air compresser things that can fill a tire just in case there comes a day when we have a flat that we don’t expect.  Who knows.  They are probably way too expensive to be worth it though.

My laptop is in my room right now, connected to my work network, and still remoted to my desk.  The plan is to wait until exactly 8:30 and log off, then hit the gas station for some air, then get my fat ass to work late.

Eight minutes left.  I will be so grateful when this garbage is over.

Seven minutes left.

On Call Update #3

It’s 11:31pm. Your humble narrator is exhausted. Only nine more hours to go. It’s nice that the hours are down to single digits, but it blows chunks that I still have more than a business day remaining.

I was just speaking to one of my fellow sufferers and he was sure that the third shift folks would be punching in shortly. I was hoping for that, but I didn’t know if they were off tonight or not. Hopefully they will take some of the sting out of the overnight.

I hope so…

Because I really…

Really…

Want to go to sleep.

Please let me go to sleep?

On Call Update #2

This has been the worst on call experience I’ve ever had.  As soon as I get close to catching up I get something new sent to me.  I had an hour and a half or so, just after noon, when I wasn’t working.  The rest of the day I’ve been working and generally not having a clue what to do.  One of the things that makes this type of on call situation awful is that I am not just covering my application.  I’m covering seven others as well.  Most of those are apps that I have never even seen prior to today, but I have to be one of only two members of the staff who handle all issues for those apps on my platform.  It’s not even my platform anymore, it’s the platform I used to work in.

I get paid for this crap, but I still hate it.  I tried to get some one to take this off of my hands, but everyone else in the rotation was smart enough to stay away.

This sucks.