Freedom From the Ball & Chain...

Today is a good day. Yes, I know it's just Tuesday and the weekend is far away. No, it's not my birthday, or anniversery, or anything like that. Today is the day I hand the pager from work off to someone else. The light of freedom will then shine on me. Okay, that's way too overdramatic, but I am happy to be giving up this small device that sometimes turns into an anchor.

For those of you who may not understand, I'll give a few more details. I'm a computer programmer; and one of the duties of my job is to be "on-call" or as it's called here "on-pager." That means for one week (9am Tue to 9am Tue) I'm the person who answers all extraneous requests for fixing things that have gone wrong. Things like program crashes, people need data for reporting purposes, data being incorrect, orders not filled (on the system) properly, etc.

During the day it's not a big deal; it's just work as normal. However, after work is when that little grenade can go off & totally trash your evening, or worse, your sleep. The worst sound, after a baby crying a 2am, is a pager going off at 2am, and knowing it means that you now have to go to work. Luckily, I can work from home, so it means I only have to stumble, half-asleep, to my desk and log on. But I still have to correct a problem & not make it worse.

Since I've been here, we've been working very proactively on issues the come around a lot & cause "wake-ups" as we call them. Therefore, now we don't get many. When I first started here in March of 06, you could count on at least one wake-up during the week & one on the weekend (at the very least). This time, I had one at 4:30am on Saturday. The good part is that it turned out to be a non-issue. Of course the bad part it that I got woken up at 4:30am on a Saturday, but I'll survive.

Now after 9am, I'll be free of this little device. I won't have to deal with it again until for a couple weeks. Yay!! :)