On Call this week

TechGromit

Ugh, was called in today because the Air Conditioners were down. Had to set up fans and pray the A/C vendor showed up before it got too hot for the servers, forcing me to power down all the systems. A good waste of 6 hours of my Saturday. What were some of the on call stuff you had to deal with?

Another day, I stayed till 4am A/V scanning a vendor laptop, before he was allowed to use it on one of our critical systems. That was bad. To make matters worst, he used it on a system that wasn't a critical system, I had to scan it again the next day before he could use it on the critical system I certified it for to begin with.

jamesleecoleman

I had left my last job on a Friday and started to get on call phone calls throughout the weekend. The VP of Tech called me during the weekend and I had to tell him that Friday was my last day lol.

I'm glad that I'm not on call anymore.

Ertaz

TechGromit wrote: »

Ugh, was called in today because the Air Conditioners were down. Had to set up fans and pray the A/C vendor showed up before it got too hot for the servers, forcing me to power down all the systems. A good waste of 6 hours of my Saturday. What were some of the on call stuff you had to deal with?

Another day, I stayed till 4am A/V scanning a vendor laptop, before he was allowed to use it on one of our critical systems. That was bad. To make matters worst, he used it on a system that wasn't a critical system, I had to scan it again the next day before he could use it on the critical system I certified it for to begin with.

I do not miss on-call 1 bit. I hate paperwork, but not as much as I love my weekend.

Kai123

I'm not on-call but people on the rotation used to hate being on it when a certain person was on-shift. He would ring at 3am explaining a non-core network related issue, how it was raised, what he did, what happened..."but its resolved now".

He had a few warnings from management but to be fair we had no on-call process.

ITSec14

I had a user call me at 1:00AM on a Sunday morning because they needed an important file restored...first of all it wasn't a P1 event, but that user was in management so I wasn't about to put up a fight...second, the file that needed to be restored was actually located in a different folder and they just forgot...

They laughed about the situation...I wanted to crack skulls

Mooseboost

I do not miss on-call at all. If I can avoid it in future positions I will. It all depends on where you are though. Some places treat it different, but the MSS I worked for treated it as normal after hours support. You can only get woken up 3-5 times a night between midnight and 8AM for trivial things before you start building voodoo dolls. Its not all bad though, I have had positions where network changes during maintenance windows were really the only calls. On the other hand I have also been woken up in other jobs for wireless issues from someone who wasn't on-site at 3AM. Win some, lose some.

hurricane1091

I don't know how to not be on-call aside from working for a large enough company or being in management. We had a rotating on-call and saw you be on call just 4 times a year, but if something network related happened and a non-network person was on call, they just called you. At my current place on employment, there's just 5 guys that do all of the systems and networks (me being the only network person), so really at any time I can be called. Lame. I have already on multiple occasions worked through problems while in the woods fishing.

jibtech

Worst on-call:

I was racing sailboats in a regatta Sunday through Tuesday. Monday afternoon, I come into the dock to see I have about 12 calls from the office.

While moving the SQL Server to a new box, my boss had accidentally formatted the wrong drive set, so all of the data was gone. He was calling me because he couldn't find the backup.

It was only a couple hours on my part, but it was hot in the July afternoon sun, sitting on a boat with a laptop tethered to a Blackberry, dialed into the network, finding where the backups had gotten stored.

And yes, I had a nice list of where everything was. Guess where I had it stored? A database on the SQL Server.

Learned a few new habits that night.

Bokeh

Had on call rotation in my last job every 4 weeks for a week. We would get the call in the middle of the night that a server wasn't responding, or orders were not dropping, printer went off line, etc. Those were fine. It was the salesperson who went on vacation and just got back who LOVED to call in the middle of the night that they weren't getting emails on one of their devices (works on the other just fine) or data is no longer available on their IPad or phone and only works on wifi now. Too many times I would tell them to come by IT in the morning, and we would look at it, this wasn't a major outage, etc. Of course, we would get the "do you know who I am" crap and "I'm going to complain to my manager and/or your manager for your non support. Told them go ahead.

Never failed, next morning I'd come in and 'dI either get a visit from their manager or a call from mine, asking what happened. Soon as I showed or told them what time they called, it was done. I usually got an apology from that salesperson after their fiasco.