Gods, I hated being on call. It was never part of our job description, but one day about a year after we were all hired, we were suddenly “on call” without any training for it.

No extra pay or benefits. Work a 12 hour day from being on call? Better show up tomorrow, same time.

What’s are the duties? Never explained. You must have a phone, and snooze the alarm within 1 minute, that’s all we knew. Can you drink? Can you go to the grocery store? Can you be 45 minutes away from an Internet connection? We were never told.

I got in trouble multiple times for not having reception inside the building. I asked for a company phone, and was denied.

How do you fix an issue? We had no idea how the IBM cloud infrastructure worked, so just struggle and hammer the snooze. I only ever fixed issues through my existing Linux knowledge, but all my coworkers only had Windows experience. Towards the end of that job, you could fix most calls by typing killall minerd (the cloud was super hacked).