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I was “on call” last week at work, for the uninitiated, “on call” means that you’re the guy that gets contacted by some combination of automated systems and live human beings if something goes wrong that needs attention.

At my company, it’s more automated systems than live human beings. This has its ups and downs. On the plus side, when the pager goes off at very-very-AM in the morning, you’ll be dealing with a computer, not an irate, sleepy human. On the minus side, you’re the irate, sleepy human that’s getting paged by the (not-too-bright) automated system. The automated system can’t make the value judgments like “that can wait until morning”, or “that happens every third day at this time. It’s safe to ignore”.

You really get to loathe the beep of your pager by the end of the week.

Dealing with pages at 2am often means staying in your nice warm bed while you determine if the page you just got was a fluke, or if it’s an indication of a real problem. After a while, if it’s a real problem, you’ll get another page. If it’s a fluke, you’ll get another page anyway, telling you everything’s OK again.

Anyone sleeping with you really gets to loathe the beep of your pager by the end of the week.

As an added bonus, our esteemed government, in its infinite wisdom, has decreed that this year, the date for Daylight Savings Time will be push up by three full weeks. This was done on the theory that we’ll use less energy with the lights on in the morning as we sleepily get ready for work in the dark than we will when we’re all at home watching TV in the evening.

I, for one, am not convinced.

The practical upshot of all of this is that scores of systems (in my company alone), many of which have been humming along without anyone needing to touch them for months, if not years, need to be upgraded to understand the new time rules. The easiest way to make sure that everything on the system knows about the new time is to reboot the system, and let everything come up properly.

Business being what it is, these upgrades are done in the middle of the night. The middle of the night, when the poor on-call person is sleeping in his nice warm bed, having just gotten back to sleep after the round of pages from an hour ago.

I really didn’t sleep from Monday night to Sunday of last week. Everyone in my family got to loathe the beep of my pager. Even the cats.

But now its over, and I’ve mostly caught up on sleep. At 8:00 Monday morning when my pager beeped and printed the words “Congrats. You are no longer primary on-call“, a burden was lifted off my shoulders. The relief increased when I passed the on-call phone off to the next poor sap (who, since DST patching is still ongoing, is having just as fun a week as I did).