It’s my week in the barrel with the stinking on-call pager yet again. I detest the stinking on-call pager; the events to which I respond are either:
- Trivial – stuff that shouldn’t happen – full filesystems come to mind. Properly managed systems never have full filesystems. When the event occurs, something is definitely amiss; alas, our systems aren’t properly managed.
- Routine problems – Oracle backup archives failing. This is usually traceable to the tape backup robots, about which I know nothing, and about which I care even less.
- Backup failures – There’s a backup window; if the backup failed within that window, the solution is to fervently hope for success tomorrow night. Such failures are generally attributable to the tape robots, etc.
- Catastrophic failures – hardware suddenly crashes. This is an all-hands on deck response; the vendor needs to be engaged, and there’s little to be done in the interim, other than relocate impacted workloads to another platform, whilst the offending one is made whole.
Imagine my surprise then, when our NOC calls my home number at around 11PM a few nights ago. I was in bed, drifting off, and MLB answered the phone. The first question the NOC mope asks MLB is Is Ken on call?
NOC mope, some advice:
- A properly prepared NOC mope knows who’s on call. You are provided with that information. Use it.
- To call someone’s home number to ask such a thing is not cool.
- The proper way of contacting someone is to, well, use the frigging pager number. In such a fashion, whomever hears the s o-cp calls you back. 21st century technology works wonders.
- You can’t replace the sleep I lost because of your idiocy.
MLB now knows the drill; any calls from 703-XXX-*, other than a carefully selected group, go to voice mail.
Even given that, (4) above remains unsolvable.
NOC mope, you are an asshole.
-k-