Anything has got to be better than the sleep I've been getting lately. Hasn't a night gone by in the last week that my pager hasn't gone off at least a half a dozen times during the middle of the night about one of the servers at work going nuts, or some idiot in the operations center can't figure out how they got their outlook into the offline mode and it won't retrieve or send any email.
You don't keep a set of dead batteries to use at times like this? I always kept a set to pop in whenever the thing started driving me nuts or when I really needed a full night's sleep. Pagers were originally intended as a way of leting you know that someone wanted to talk to you "whenever it was convenient for you". Now, some people expect it to be a fire alarm and expect you to answer them at any time 24 hours a day. Are you getting paid for 24 hours a day? I think not. Then drop in the dead batteries and get a good night's sleep, then call them in the morning and ask if everything is OK, or wait until they're trying to sleep and page them every half hour all night long to get even.
I used to get office calls for folks that lost their icon for Word in windoz 95 and couldn't work until I came out and "fixed" their computer..
Love that easy money, thank (insert choice) for technopeasents...
mac
Please remove splinters before emailing
I'm just guessing here, but shouldn't you be a few levels farther down (up) the support food-chain?
er
On 2/6/2006 10:50 AM Charley mumbled something about the following:
We are a 24/7 operation (we host over several thousands of banks online presence). There are 4 admins in our home office to run the corporate side that keeps the hosting operation alive, and we rotate the pager duty. I just happened to have it this past week, and since I'm salaried, I'm paid to work whenever they need me to work, which is often times in the middle of the night or weekends. If I don't answer the pager, it's a good chance I won't have a job the next day.
See my previous reply to Charley. When on call, you are all the levels up/down the food chain.
I think I told my thanksgiving (sysadmin recovery) story here awhile back. Finally got out and into more of a research environment, which makes me happy. :)
er
I started here as a software engineer, they downsized and offered me a position as a sysadmin or go find another job. I was already being paid at the top of the scale for a developer, way over the top for an admin, and this was in 2002, so I took the admin position. Here it is now
2006, and I've gotten good pay raises (not great, just good), and now I'm paid way more than I can find in any admin or development position around here. The only positions I can find that pay over $100k a year are management, and there's currently no way I'll go back into management (not that I look like the management typeI was a one man electrical dept/factory rep for a North American sales/service business (printing industry). My territory was all of North America, all 50 states, and the Carribean and I had no one else to give my pager to or to take over for me when I wasn't available, so it was sometimes necessary to have dead batteries for sanity reasons. If I returned the call and I couldn't fix their problem over the phone I usually had to be on a flight within 3 hours. I always had a packed suitcase in the car and never knew when or where I might be going or when I might be coming back. Fortunately I was able to fix most problems over the phone, but I sometimes ended up traveling for up to 3 weeks at a time before returning home. I have said goodbye to my wife at breakfast and then called her that evening from half way around the world to say I wouldn't be home for supper (she would get mad whenever I called from Hawaii because I was there without her). At least you only have to suffer 1/4 of the time and you get to go home at night, but I do feel for you. Corporate America has no idea how much stress this puts on those of us who serve this way (and doesn't care).
Now that's a classic unix mug.
Nice pic, thanks for that. :)
er
Tue, Feb 7, 2006, 7:26am snipped-for-privacy@ngynagnovxre.arg (Odinn) did posteth: (not that I look like the management type
Damn. I used to think "my" picture looked bad. Never more, never more. LMAO
JOAT Don't believe everything you think.
Me I keep seeing him, hair braided on the temples, waving a claymore about in a crowd of frantic monks.
er
How about this pic?
On 2/7/2006 11:34 PM Dave Balderstone mumbled something about the following:
Yer little brother stand 6'0", weigh in at 240 lbs, and have a last name of Sloan? :)
On 2/7/2006 1:26 PM Mike Marlow mumbled something about the following:
Unfortunately, I'm forced into a Windows world. I still manage about
20+ AIX servers, about 10 HP servers and about another 20 linux servers, and 150+ Windows servers. Although, my unix counts will go up after we consolidate 2 of our offices later this month, 50+ Solaris and AIX servers. At least I don't have to manage the Exchange or AV or spyware or backups, those are handled by the other admins.
Just an aside, but thanks to you (and the Internet), a nagging mystery of longstanding is solved. Some 45 years after first reading Scott, then again a few months ago (A Legend of Montrose), I finally got the opportunity this morning to get off my butt, DAGS, and see exactly what the hell a "claymore" is:
Thanks. ;)
On 2/8/2006 7:16 AM Swingman mumbled something about the following:
Okay, yer the only coonass and I'm the only redneck now.
That may be so, but after checking into it, it wasn't all that much cheaper. That is unless your kids take you on a camping trip and build the bondfire... with loving care of course. A hole in the ground with a marker is around $4000 , a hole in a wall was $3000, and a hole in a iddy-biddy box (marble of course) was $2800. Piss of your kids and wife before you go and they'll do the job for free. (just kidding of course)
Lee
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