You call me in the middle of some much-needed beauty sleep to ask me whether you should, in fact, be calling me? :mad:
I’m cool with being on 24-hour call on a rotation basis, that’s just a part of the job. My cell phone is always on, because the other engineers may need to consult when they’re on call - that too comes with the job and is one of the reasons my job title has the word “Senior” in it.
But I’m not, repeat: not, the fucking graveyard 411 of the IT department.
Now, someone working the night shift in the data center may not be quite up to troubleshooting intricate network problems, and that’s cool - that’s why we have escalation procedures. But it is part of their fucking job to know exactly who the engineers on call are. Preferably before the crap hits the fan.
And if they find they don’t know, they bloody well need to call their manager, whose job it is to provide such information. Not me. I will get annoyed, irritable, snarky, caustic and sarcastic. And other words that denote irritability.
(Didn’t help any that the actual engineer on call got stuck and actually had to call for a consult. At 5:30. Yay.)
Perhaps you could try doing what we do - we rotate an on-call phone amongst ourselves so the helpdesk crew only needs to know one number and be assured that whoever answers the phone is truly the on-call.
It completely eliminated the whole “No, you server-felching ignorant mouthbreathing piece of newbie spam, I was the on-call last week. Joe’s on-call tonight.” problem
Dude, you’re a Senior whatsit, right? That means you can afford buy a few extra cell phones:
Cell phone for being on-call. It’s only on when you’re on-call. Otherwise, they get voice mail that says, “I’m not on call right now. Please call 234-567-8910 to see who is on call.”
Cell phone for fellow engineers for when they need to escalate. That’s the one that stays on.
Sounds like they have been burned before when calling primary support only to find out that their manager didn’t setup the on-call list properly (support group managers setup the lists where I am, not my manager). And then proceed to get bitched out by the supposed primary for calling them when they shouldn’t have–screaming and ranting because how dare anyone call them when they’re listed as primary support. When explained, “but sir, you’re listed as primary support”, followed by more screaming and a holier than thou attitude about how stupid the people calling them are. Get your on-call lists corrected and maybe you won’t have the problem of people asking if you’re the primary person right off the bat, because that’s what is sounds like… they want to know if you’re actually the on-call person like the lists states, before they get bitched out for something that is not their fault.
Our on-call list are notoriously inaccurate. The list gets faxed and then changes occur within the on call group for whatever reason. We have too many on-call lists to keep track of the changes made by each group and we have never recieived an updated list from any group.
The best way we found to hande it is to have an ‘on-call phone’ that gets passed around. That way the phone number stays the same and it ensures whoever is on call passes off any important information to the person who is going on call and also getting the phone.
Well, that’s fair enough, isn’t it? I did the graveyard thing myself for 18 months, I know it’s not fun to wake up people. Mistakes happen, no biggie. We had the escalation information on the shift turnover reports, so no outdated lists were floating around.
But our specific genius-in-training had apparently printed out the list from the intranet some time ago, and deduced (correctly) that his printed version was wrong, because the on-call is no longer with the company. So instead of checking the intranet for the updated list, he grabs a random name, in this case, mine. And then basically tells me that too bad, so sad, but tonight is my night to tell him what he should already know and, failing that, could easily have found out on his own. Yeah, that pushes my buttons.