I've been 'primary' at work this week. This means whenever a customer has a problem with their application that our monitoring shows up and they call for tech support from our group, it's my responsibility. This is a 24-7 responsibility. I knew this before I took the job, and it didn't bother me.
A little history. When I first started there, the 'regular employees' did not want contractors, they wanted more regulars. So for the first two months, I had no training, and was pretty much ignored while they battled it out with the team's manager. Two months ago, I didn't even know if I would still have a job by now, and very well might not have.
Three weeks ago, I had my first week of being primary. But since I've had virtually no training, it was only during my regular 40 hour work week, so any after hours call was taken care of by one of the regulars.
They decided that I did well enough last time that I could be left on my own this time with them as a backup if I needed it, which was fine with me. I got a few calls during the week and managed them alone.
Saturday morning, at 3am, one of our customers had made a change in which signon servers they used. When they did that, they ran into a technical issue with those servers that caused their application to alarm on our monitor, and couldn't figure out where the problem was coming from. Off goes my cell phone. Fortunately I'm a light sleeper, and I've set my mind to listen for that tone, so I woke up right away. Groggilly stepping into my living room and facing my work laptop, I had only a few minutes to dial the operations center and get on the conference call with the other 8 people before they called the regular from our team who is my backup, and woke him up. That would have been bad. So there I am, at 3am, trying to shake the sleep from my brain, remember all the codes and sequences to remotely log into our secure network and see what was going on. Then I had to remember the proper steps to stop our systems from monitoring their application without bringing our whole system down, which was a definite possibility, and also would have been very bad. But I remembered all the codes, did the right proceedures, shut off monitoring their app, everybody was happy, and went back to bed.
Of course, nothing happened all day yesterday. But at 5am today, I got another call. It seems that there was a weekend admin for an application that started alarming last thursday, and the manager of that app told me to just let it alarm and she would inform her staff to ignore it until they fixed the problem, but forgot to tell him. So after bringing that fact up to the admin and the operations center person, they all appologised for getting me out of bed so early, thanked me for my help, and vowed to note the app manager's wishes for their entire staffs.
I still love this job, it's the best one I've ever had. And it appears that I'm pretty good at it too. So I guess paying my dues with a few early morning calls is a fair trade off, especially considering how the experience I'll gain, and the recomendations I'll have, will look on my resume when I go for a better job after I graduate with a bachelor's degree. Yeah, it's worth it.
And the future still looks bright. :-)
