Operators Are Standing By!
Dec. 29th, 2010 01:12 pmI'm systems engineering on-call primary this week. There are four of us who cycle through the roll so I'm the backup on-call or the primary on-call one week each with two weeks off.
When I first noticed that I'd be on-call during the peak of the holiday season, I was a little miffed, but then I realized that this is the slowest part of my employer's business calendar and a huge percentage of our in-house staffers & developers were going to be on vacation. Enlightenment: with neither customers nor developers to mess up my apps & servers, this is the single best time of the year to be on-call!
Still, I'm faithfully in mybunker basement computer cave home office, catching up on email, dealing with the occasional automated alert and generally cleaning up my files:

When I first noticed that I'd be on-call during the peak of the holiday season, I was a little miffed, but then I realized that this is the slowest part of my employer's business calendar and a huge percentage of our in-house staffers & developers were going to be on vacation. Enlightenment: with neither customers nor developers to mess up my apps & servers, this is the single best time of the year to be on-call!
Still, I'm faithfully in my