Loving On-Call

I love being On-Call. It’s a weird thing to love, but let me tell you why.

Some might say it’s an adrenaline junkie thing, although that’s not me. I actually do not like the cortisol of surprise and urgency that comes from accidents. My outlook is to stay in the moment and listen, avoiding reactions that can lead to panic.

Others could say it has something to do with personality. I used to believe this, but I think it’s more complicated than that. Yeah, “born to do ops” has crossed my lips. And it’s true, the Sysadmin mindset attracted me from an early age. Figuring out how things operated, working backstage in theatre, organizing music concerts, being my own roadie.

Lots of folks I meet online, like me, have a history of childhood trauma. I’ve certainly been in a lot of conversations where we’ve agreed there is some inherent predisposition to doing incident response. We all have had to learn survival through improvisation, for many of us life feels like a string of impromptu scenes. So handling failure is our natural stomping ground.

I cannot help but be curious. My brain notices patterns, it wants to continuously build them. It gives me an advantage in developing good troubleshooting skills. My memory is visual and spacial, I often dream in shapes. Grasping and internalizing complexity comes naturally (my math skills, however, are limited to music and geometry).

At work I get into building software, running projects, writing specs, teaching about resilience, all the things I get to do while it’s not my shift. And while it’s true I hate being woken up at 3AM or having life disrupted by the pager… there’s a little bit of desire in it, too.

On-Call is when I get to work with people I never get to work with. When I actually get to be on the ship and watch it run, see the big engines whir, the data hum. Observing how people work during accidents is fascinating, for me it’s a little like watching a jazz group perform.

It’s when I know exactly what I’m supposed to be doing. I can spend my laser focus on the problems that arise. Improve areas that need curation. I get to creatively work up solutions on the fly.

There’s a sense of adventure in watching the environment for change. Observing the entire complex system step forward, one person’s decision at a time.