Wednesday, July 20, 2005
On call
If my fingers today are adept at handling many mobile phones, I should thank my previous company for this. During my stint in one of the projects there, I was given a mobile phone to carry with me over most weekends coz I was supposed to be "On call" and believe me it wasn't always a happy occasion.
If you have been part of a support or maintenance project (I mean in the software industry) then you probably would know what being on call means. If you haven't then its your good fortune. What this term means is that during weekends and holidays, you would be called on the phone to fix an issue and you are pretty safe if by some burst of clairvoyance, you have an inkling as to what the issue is and also have a ready solution in hand, else be prepared to traverse the entire distance to your office and in the course of this travel come up with a solution which you can readily apply on reaching the workplace. No, this is not as complicated as my previous sentence sounds.
I know that my weekend is wrecked the minute I am entrusted with a company provided mobile phone which would be my confidant for the next two days. The biggest misery for me is not the impending phone call but the actual wait for it. During these days, I would never part with the phone as if my whole life depended on it. Every two minutes, i would steal a furtive glimpse of this insipid object so much so that its contours would be sketched in my mind till eternity. And when the phone does ring, its a big relief for I would have something (other than waiting for that dreaded phone call) to look forward to for the remainder of the weekend.
If you have been part of a support or maintenance project (I mean in the software industry) then you probably would know what being on call means. If you haven't then its your good fortune. What this term means is that during weekends and holidays, you would be called on the phone to fix an issue and you are pretty safe if by some burst of clairvoyance, you have an inkling as to what the issue is and also have a ready solution in hand, else be prepared to traverse the entire distance to your office and in the course of this travel come up with a solution which you can readily apply on reaching the workplace. No, this is not as complicated as my previous sentence sounds.
I know that my weekend is wrecked the minute I am entrusted with a company provided mobile phone which would be my confidant for the next two days. The biggest misery for me is not the impending phone call but the actual wait for it. During these days, I would never part with the phone as if my whole life depended on it. Every two minutes, i would steal a furtive glimpse of this insipid object so much so that its contours would be sketched in my mind till eternity. And when the phone does ring, its a big relief for I would have something (other than waiting for that dreaded phone call) to look forward to for the remainder of the weekend.
# posted by Praveen @ 7:12 AM 
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This is so well written. And particularly poignant as I went through the same situation in my first job. Of course now I have a choice of saying "No". It's a relief not having a mobile. But I still jump when someone elses mobile rings:))
good one...made me remember the only weekend i wuz placed on-call...and how i messed up gloriously...the application i worked on crashed and i wuz in a multiplex watching 3 movies at a stretch...and my fone wuz out of range! the lead developer who wuz away on vacation had to be rung up and make the fix remotely.
"Every two minutes, i would steal a furtive glimpse of this insipid object so much so that its contours would be sketched in my mind till eternity."
Well written....good play of words.:)
and yeah u dont ve to be a techie to go through this :(
Well written....good play of words.:)
and yeah u dont ve to be a techie to go through this :(
Me too have been lucky but in a totally different way!!!
I was at the client site and even got an on-call pager for a week... The Client did not pay the bill for the last month and therefore the service was deactivated - therefore I could not be reached in a crisis situation and the fault was the Clients'
How cool of them to not pay the bill as part of cost-cutting :)
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I was at the client site and even got an on-call pager for a week... The Client did not pay the bill for the last month and therefore the service was deactivated - therefore I could not be reached in a crisis situation and the fault was the Clients'
How cool of them to not pay the bill as part of cost-cutting :)
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