As with most IT jobs, I have a period of time where I am “on call” and have to carry the “point phone” for my group. And while I refuse to actually operate that crappy old Motorola phone (thank you forwarding), it’s not nearly as bad as sticking around with a machine nearby you for a week straight.
While I have a BlackBerry (love my 8830 WE) which technically makes me on-call 24/7/365 via phone or email, email is a more limited on-call sort of thing. I might not check it, and I don’t have a scheduled “check” time in the evenings. It’s more convenience for me and the others that at night/weekend, I can put the ball back in their court with a quick response. The voice part though is the worst part.
Our on-call system is, like I said, a point phone system. All the field techs, the help desk, the machine room operators, managers, etc… know this phone number. If they suspect anything is a network issue, they call that number. If a telco sees an issue that under our SLA they are to call into the help desk/after hours staff, I eventually get a phone call. Basically, you get a LOT of phone calls. And 99%, you don’t need to deal with.
I say that because of our uptime requirements. Basically, we need to have 24/7 five nine’s uptime from 8 AM to 5 PM across both time zones. The rest of the time, for the most part (there are a few 24/7 shops out there), I don’t care if the WAN link is down because no one is there. No affected users, and no one to look at it. Since the first thing a telco will ask is if you verified power and local equipment, and no one is there, pointless to even check on it. Better to just check the weather in the area to see if a power outage is likely in that area, or check the logs of other devices in the city/region to check for a pattern. All of this though, can be done from home. And that’s nice, and not so nice at the same time.
Our system of getting hours for on-call time is:
- You get “straight time” for anything you do from home.
- You get “inconvenience time” if you HAD to come into the office to work on/check on something. And they ask that you try to work from home first. That doesn’t always happen, as not all of my team bothers to keep home Internet access (they don’t use it). So for some, it’s inconvenience time all the time. That means 3 hours of pay “added” to the week (if you have one period of Inc Time in a 40 hour week, you now have a 43 hour week, 0 overtime hours, minus the number of hours you actually worked on the issue. So, you are left with a choice. Go in, ruin your night, and try for the hours (which they will ask you to flex out anyway), or try from home, and get screwed on the money/hours thing.
Not to mention the fun calls that come in. I get a phone call from a “non-native English speaker” in 3rd shift operations one night. Guy doesn’t even say who he is, just starts.
Me: “Hello?”
Him: “Tee, juan, down. Fi juan queue ecks gee eh…”
Me: “Whoa, slow down. Did _____ call this in? What city? When?”
Him: “I don’t know, I just supposed to call. Will you look at dis?”
Me: “Send me all of this in an email please. I’ll look at it.”
Hang up.
Already mad, I log into the support portal to find the list of sites down. All in one town. Radar shows….. *drum roll* a giant thunderstorm over the city! And not a single site is a 24/7! And it’s Sunday at 1:45 AM! And it’s the NIGHT AFTER MIKE’S WEDDING!!!!
Needless to say, I dread Oct 1. The next time I start a week of on-call is then. Every 18 weeks, I get a rotation. Must be within 10 minutes of the office is the unofficial rule. Thankfully, I have an Aircard…
