Story time:

This one time I was hired as a tier-3 Unix & Linux support engineer at managed-hosting provider who shall not be named. This was back in my prime, I'd already had 10 ~ 15 years industry experience, so I was hired to deal with the really nasty problems that percolated up the chain, and to solve those problems via ongoing process-improvement loop. Over time my job got easier and easier, because lower tier engineers gained training and better standard, procedures, etc... I was on a two person team, we traded the on-call duty every other week. One day the other person left the company, and that began a comedy of errors...

We tried to fill the position both internally and externally, but the position was mostly vacant. Meanwhile I was covering the on-call 24/7 on a tentative basis, until we hired a permanent replacement. Welp, long story short... I fell victim to my own success. Management observed that there was no apparent disruption to the tier-3 area of operation, and that was mostly true, so they decided to eliminate the redundancy. BIG MISTAKE!

I politely told management that I'd no longer be covering on-call 24/7, and go back to every other week; That I was burnt-out waiting for a replacement, and not being able to plan vacations, or even experience off-hours serenity for fear of the on-call phone ringing. That didn't go very well, I was told that I'd be subject to disciplinary action, and they would make accomodation for vacations, but that I had to remain on-call 24/7.

So I decided to become a party animal, every other week. As soon as I left work for the day, I'd start getting drunk. I had parties every night, or went to parties, bars, or whatever... on the weekend I'd go camping at state or national parks with 1-bar of signal for on-call device, I'd be on a boat in the middle of a lake an hour away from my laptop back at the cabin. Stuff like that, pretty much I'd make myself available 24/7, but there was zero assurance I'd be sober or whatever... every other week.

This one time I went into work, and somebody was joking to me about something in context, like as if I knew what they were talking about, but I had no idea. Apparently I was engaged the night before while blackout drunk, and was semi-belligerent with the tier-2 engineer, but was able to get whatever emergency escalated issue resolved in a most anti-climatic manner. The story I heard was something about slurring-out linux commands from a noisy bar, and threatening to drive home (drunk) to ssh into a customer's system. But whatever instruction I gave over mobile did the trick, and the company barely met the contractual SLA for that incident!

So my plan kinda backfired. Management figured out what was going on, and while being applauded for doing my job, I was formally written-up for being drunk on-call. So I responded by stating that's only every other week, and my on-call rotation is documented on the company calendar. I asked if I was never permitted to drink off-hours while employed at the company, and that got HR involved. Apparently it was not entirely legit to be on-call 24/7, nor to intrude into my personal life to such an extent. So I was asked to sign something, an amended employment contract. I refused, and suddenly my performance reviews tanked the next few quarters, and was eventually let-go via a round of "layoffs". The entire tier-3 was eliminated, and they went with a tier-0 ~ tier-2 hierarchy (whatever that entails). No harsh feelings, I'm still in touch with many peeps.

It was at this point I transitioned from supporting Linux to making Linux. Pursued my passion, and started working full time as open source developer, and lived happily ever after not being on-call ever again. Or so I thought. Turns out software development occasionally has grindy rushes to meet deadlines, the so-called "crunch" culture, and instead of having a company provided on-call device... work peeps were calling my private number, in the middle of the night.

And so it goes...