So once again I was on-call for the weekend leaving me tethered to the office by phantom strings half the day both Saturday and Sunday. I've never been a fan of on-call because it is very life limiting. From seven o'clock in the morning to seven o'clock in the evening my name might as well be Service Bitch. It's not that the level of work funneled into On-Call is particularly high or regular, it is neither of these things and that's really the problem.
If I knew that during an average weekend on-call shift that I would get even two calls an hour from the start to the end of shift then it wouldn't be so annoying, I'd simply treat it as any other work day. With indeterminate frequency and volume, however, I'm kinda fucked. I can't get into anything too involved as messy automotive or home improvement projects for fear of getting a call in the middle of them. I can't go to movies with friends because I wouldn't want to get called out in the middle of them. Can't ride my motorcycle 'cause I need to be able to answer the phone. Basically, when I'm on-call I'm stuck to short trips around home and small interrupt tolerant projects.
Even hanging out with friends is kind of a joke. Chilling at a friend's place when I get a call means that I've got to retreat into a laptop for four or five hours because somebody somewhere in the world thinks that maybe I've got some notion of what's going on but they're not sure themselves so I have to sit on an IRC channel, ear plugged into a conference bridge until they realize they've got the wrong guy and let me go. (Yeah, this has happened a few times.) Not really a friendly sort of social experience, IMHO.
'Bout the only really good aspect of my current on-call situation of which rotations are far too frequent for my liking is that I get a bonus for making myself available. When I think about it I can honestly say that I would happily forgo that bonus to simply not be tied to a pager.
(I've been at places that do no offer pager bonuses simply calling it part of the job. That's ass.)
Anyway, I'm off on-call duty for the next couple of weeks. Yay!
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