Photo: From my honeymoon in Bora Bora back in 2001.
What a week this is turning out to be. Things seem to be going wrong left, right, and centre. It is as if all things I’ve done wrong in previous lives are coming back to bite me on the arse.
Yes – it’s on-call week.
It’s pretty much an accepted fact that if you work as a systems administrator that you’re going to do a lot on-call at some point in your career. I’ve been doing it for 18 years straight – the only job in which I never had on-call put into my contract was at Imagineer Systems.
While on-call has its rewards (mostly monetary), a big part of me is wanting to retire from the stresses and the interruption that part of the job of being a systems administrator brings. I’m beginning to think that on-call is for the young - and that’s no exaggeration.
My first job out of university was working for a local Norwich-based PC sales/repair firm that transitioned into an ISP thanks to my “experience” with Linux. For an annual salary of £8,000 a year, my role was effectively the technical manager position managing a staff of one – me. I was on-call for 24 hours, 7 days a week, 365 days a year for nearly two years. Despite the lack of money, I loved that job. I got to experiment, to tinker, to learn.
And I took that philosophy of making myself available to work all hours of the day and night with me to all subsequent jobs.
But as I get older, I find myself becoming very grumpy whenever I get a call out at 2am, just before I get home, just before I sit down to eat, or just about to go to bed (or have just gone to bed).
I hate having to disturb others on secondary because it should be my responsibility to deal with any problems. This is why I become a hermit on my on-call shifts. I don’t go anywhere. On-call is incredibly isolating. It’s a bit like being a hermit yuppie (or a yuppie hermit).
The lack of sleep and the additional hours can really take its toll at times.
What I’d really like to be doing in my later years (that is, in my 40s) outside of the working day:
Clik here to view.
Good luck trying to find a company willing to pay you to do this.. ironically I had just been made redundant before getting married, so I went to Bora Bora and New Zealand unemployed..
I’m absolutely not complaining about my job or its duties (my employers and my colleagues are fantastic – you couldn’t ask for a better place to work), but there are days I wish I became something else other than working in IT.
As our society becomes ever more dependent on the internet and technology, the greater the pressure on us systems administrators to keep things ticking along.
It’s said that technology is indistinguishable from magic. That must make us sysadmins magicians.
Now for my next trick..
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
