After weeks of flying under the radar I got the joy of being “technically” on call this weekend. I mean technically since I am always on call. I get calls for problems even when I am not the person who is supposed to be called. It comes with my position. One of the worst things that can happen to me is to be sleeping and get woken up with some major systems outage. It get the same feeling I used to get when I ran on an EMS squad in college and a call would come in late at night. The only difference is being on call at work usually does not require me to go out in the cold to respond to something.
To set a good example I took the on call pager this week. Well it is not really a pager. We all have nextel’s (most with Blackberry’s), so we just route the emergency number to the Nextel of whoever is on call. Of course most of the team was happy when I got to be on call. They assume if someone calls for a non emergency I will give them a verbal beat down. They are probably correct.