Re: Surprise?
we are all increasingly "on-call."
Not all. I check email when I want to check email. Some of my co-workers have my mobile phone number, and in rare cases (maybe a couple of times a year) they use it; and if I'm in the mood, I answer it. (I don't keep my phone near the bed, so if I'm asleep, they're out of luck.)
Set boundaries you're comfortable with, and make yourself sufficiently valuable to the organization that you can get away with it.
On a related point, though, I'll note that for a while in the 90's I was part of a small development team here that also acted as second- or third-line support for one of our products. Since it was something customers deployed in critical production apps, we had 24/7 support, and so there was a rotating on-call position. But whoever carried the pager for the week was compensated for it; I don't remember how much, but it wasn't insignificant.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
