Reply to post: Re: Been there, done that.

Re: Been there, done that.

Years back (at a .govt.nz) on-call was a 'gentleman's agreement' with the business... then one particular business group wanted a formal contract (something to do with an FTP process they wanted nursing - it was very specific). I agreed to be part of a roster of 3 (I think)... it was money for nothing - the FTP process normally ran at about 3pm, so it wasn't going to be an A/H problem. Also, the extra kiwi pesos in my payslip weren't insignificant.

The process was to cut the helldesk phone over to a mobile... no IVR, so users didn't know they were going thru to a cellphone. You'd get the odd user ringing thru saying something like "oh I didn't expect someone to answer - I've forgotten my password"... and my response was "Sorry, I will log a ticket for you and someone will look at for you in the morning" (this is exactly what the on-call variation/contract said).

I would get the occasional one saying "oh, the other guy last week helped me" (and I would die a little inside, but re-state my position, expanding on what the on-call arrangements were, ie, they weren't paying for after hours/on-call support, so they would have to wait until the next business day - mostly the users were understanding, eg I've just got back in the country and I didn't even know what the time was, oh well, suppose I should sleep - yes, yes you should :rolleyes:)

But then one day we had a very specialised (and temporary) (read self-important) business group needing to get a report out ... they rang through after hours to me with some kind of problem - can't remember what it was - printer wasn't working, maybe... how the holy fuck I was supposed to fix that remotely, I don't know. Gave them my usual spiel and they said "oh [Desktop Manager] said there was someone on call to help us"..... hmmmm... news to me, so I told them so, and they said they were going to ring [DM]... ok, fine, she's not technically in my chain of command, so she can't tell me what to do. 1/2 an hour later [DM] is ringing me, and I bluntly said "At what point did you think it might be a polite thing to do and give the oncall person, me, a heads up that this business group needed help?"

She was a shite manager and spouted some bollocks about this group's report was needing to go to the PM's office. I said something about 'lack of planning on their part doesn't make an emergency on mine". The stupid thing was if she had just given me the heads up I probably would have helped if I could (grudgingly). But because of her lack of common courtesy, I dug my toes in and quoted the on-call contract I had signed. She threatened to go to her boss (who was my boss' boss)... I told her go for it and when my on-call rotating was finished that week I was resigning from it... leaving them only two people on the roster.

I can't remember what the outcome was that night, but I kept my word and resigned from on-call, and while I missed the money, it was so good not to have to worry about that damn phone. Even though it was 1 week in 3, it was still a PITA - couldn't go away, couldn't go to the pub, couldn't go to the pictures.....

Fast forward a few years and they tried to bring 'proper' on-call.... for the whole department, not just that one business group. The remuneration was calculated a slightly different way, but when you applied the numbers, it worked out to be about 60% of the original agreement (so you want to pay me less for supporting more?)

I refused to sign the contract variation.... I had several 'conversations' with senior management & HR, but by this stage I was unioned up, and I would copy my delegate into every conversation. and I would relay the above and the union rep would say "he kinda has a point"

These days I'm at an IT outsourcer in a specialised role operating "in the cloud" (whoooo).... so no on-call (business support hours only, and even then 99.99% outages are ground-to-cloud connectivity related, so don't talk to me, talk to network support)

Ahhhh... these forums are a bit like therapy! Icon cos I feel like I need some stress relief now.