On-call

I'll say one positive thing about being on-call... it prepares you for taking care of infants! But seriously, changing diapers, feeding and comforting infants in your sleep is a snap after getting up to fix computer problems. And babies are more fun to cuddle than a keyboard!

I was handed a beeper at the ripe 'ole age of 20 when I could still stay up all night without feeling it. So I developed survival skills. For example, I learned to write all documentation so that I could follow it almost literally with my eyes closed. I also set-up tons of little scripts that monitor everything I could think of so that I would be notified by my servers when they were close to failing, instead of by a human. That improved my on-call experience a great deal. And I can fall asleep (and have done so) in the middle of an outage, and wake up again to continue when necessary.

I was on a one year contract job in Albuquerque NM back "in the day". The computers were UNIVAC 1108s and the applications were from BellLabs for premise and facilities data. Bell customer service used the systems to create service tickets and to resolve problems. Bell had done a study and concluded that they lost $100,000.00 in revenue for every hour they were down. Right now I would find that incredibly stressful. At 23 it didn't phase me. I did my best to resolve the problem as soon as possible and that was it.

One morning at the 7:45am turn-over meeting (that frustrates me!), the third shift operators announced that there had been a disk crash during the night, the recovery procedure had been followed and all was well. I was very impressed with the guy because he'd followed the documentation all by himself for the first time. So after the meeting I went over and shook his hand and expressed by great exuberance that he's done it without calling me. He informed me that I was nuts (well I already knew that part); that I'd been on the phone with him the entire time, helping him through the procedure!

I had noticed that I woke up with a hole in my sock that wasn't there when I went to sleep, but I didn't put two and two together at that time. Apparently (and my ex backed him up on this), they called. I stood in the kitchen and helped them for over an hour. During which time my puppy chewed a hole in my sock while I was wearing it. Then I went back to sleep and pushed the whole experience into the category of a dream.

To me oncall problems are like video games that I get paid for playing. If I didn't enjoy fixing those problems so much, I'd be really frustrated too!