As many of you already know, every so often, I come up in the on-call rotation for my job. Being on-call means that you sacrifice your off-time to catch calls coming into the support center. We’re technically a 24/7 center, but we only work during the daylight hours, from 6am to 7pm. From 7pm to 6am, we start dolling calls out to the rotation, depending on who’s up first, second, third, fourth, fifth, etc. This week, I am the number one guy in the rotation, which means I catch every call… not just the ones that trickle down the flagpole to my cell (because everyone else was unavailable). I got a little taste of it last week, when I was the secondary. The higher up in the list you are, the more likely you will be receiving calls.
The week started out pretty good, I thought. Monday night was quiet. Tuesday night was a little more hectic with four calls. Wednesday had one call. Thursday had three calls. I noticed how quickly my sleep time was being abridged in the long run. By the time Friday rolled around, I had a grand total of 4 hours of sleep in forty-eight hours, and I still had my work shift to complete on top of the on-call duty. Friday night (last night) was a complete string of nonstop calls from the time I got home until 3am. I got a whole 2 hours of sleep and another call came in, then I went back to sleep for 2 hours and got woken up by someone else. The whole day has been nothing but calls, emails, escalations, and prodding people to help out (even though it’s a weekend day and they’d rather not be working).
I’d go into more details, but I don’t want to bore you with them. Suffice to say that I was really happy today when two people, a manager and a vice-president, sent me emails stating that they thought I was doing a great job with the on-call stuff. So, I guess there’s that. For me, I would just really like to sleep through a night without my phone going off or an alarm coming through. And I know that Julia would love that, too.
