silentcorner

Anyone who’s had a pager for an extended period of time has probably experienced phantom beeps or vibrations… when you think you hear or feel your pager going off, but it’s not. I’ve been “on-call” 24×7 for pretty much 9 of the last 11 years. On-call meaning that I’ve had to be reachable 24 hours a day in the event of a problem or a customer calling (depending on the job) and therefore carried a cell-phone or a pager, or both (and at one time I carried 2 cell phones and a pager.) I was realizing last night at 2:30am that I’ve gone beyond phantom beeps into “it’s just not happening.” As I woke up, I looked at my cell phone to see it was ringing, placed it nicely back down on the nightstand, and laid right back down, only to realize a couple minutes later that I was supposed to answer that, and called back.

Part of it is my own fault. I have an incessant need to always know what’s going on with the environment I’m responsible for. I now carry a cell phone, a pager, and a PDA with me at all times. This allows me to access my systems from anywhere my cell phone can get a signal. Some people call it an electronic leash, but I actually call it freedom. If the reason I was being called was for cases that could wait until I’m “on the clock” it would be different. But when the problem needs to be resolved immediately, no matter where I am, then having the ability to address it (and get on with life) while standing in line at the theater, visiting a friend, or enjoying some bubbly at a local watering hole, is a life saver. For that matter, being able to roll over at night, open my PDA, and restart a process on some server, is worlds better than having to get out of bed and power on a computer.

The problem I sometimes fall into now, though, is that it’s become so commonplace with me, that I almost fail to even react when something happens, particularly at night where I’ve gotten to the point I can sleep through my pager or phone at times (or look at it dumbfounded like last night thinking “neat… lights… sound…. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz”). Who knows… maybe the next step will be to install a mind control device that can interupt my dreams, and allow me to connect to work and fix problems in my subconcious. Wouldn’t that be cool?