I’m nobody. But that doesn’t stop my mind from wandering and imagining things. A little bit of schizophrenia there. to make it worse, if there are things happening repeatedly which are not so desirable and not so frequent otherwise, I inadvertently think about a conspiracy.
Of late, our team is asked to do on-call support, apart from our usual software development duties. It is done by rotation. We are a group of 6 developers so each one of us gets to do (read: must do) on call support for 1 week, once in every 6 weeks.

Before this group, there was another group of 6 doing the on-call. I had been observing the tickets they receive, how the tickets are resolved, which all stakeholders are involved in the discussion, etc. My observation was that most of the tickets come during EST, as most of the customers are in that time zone. During IST, we rarely get any ticket.

However, things are different when I’m on-call. There is a ticket every day, sometimes more than one ticket. The tickets would come at most odd hour (this could be just my feeling), or just when I step away for a bio break or to go to cafeteria to fetch some food.

Twice, I was requested by fellow colleagues to step in for them as they had to take care of things (personal, not professional). Being a good Samaritan, I agreed. There were no tickets or alerts when they were working. On my day, there were. And major alerts. Do not assume that they would return the favor for covering me. Now the most recent incident.

As it is, Secondly, my turn this time the daylight saving has been on so I’ve to support for one extra hour in the evening. Late night, 8:30pm that is. Getting sick of it, I asked my manager if I could leave early and login from home. He did not comment. I took that as yes. Now here is where it gets out of control.

There was one ticket when I was commuting back to home. I was contacted on IM, followed by a call on desk phone (I was not there to attend, obviously). I reached home. and immediately tried to login. My system was forced restarted as part of some IT process, I was working from home so had no work phone with me, where the technical support folks contact, so the within 4 minutes the alert got escalated. Nobody from my team did anything. Thankfully one kind soul from GMT stepped in to offer help. By the time I was back in the system, the waters were calm. It must be, as the tides were now in my head.

Why oh why? I’m destiny’s not so favorite child. So many things could’ve, would’ve, should’ve been differently.

1. I should have STAYED.
2. When I asked my manager, he should have asked me to stay.
3. When I was leaving, he could have asked somebody to be backup support.
4. Where there was ticket, he could have called me to inform me about the ticket
5. He could have asked somebody in office to investigate the issue, as I left after informing him, and he knew I would reach in 1 hour.
6. My laptop could have started directly without going for a Windows Update.

I slept with this anxiety and restlessness in mind, I woke up with the same bitterness in my head, and in my mouth, as if I’ve swallowed a glassful of bitter gourd juice. As I got ready for work, I tried shaking those evil thoughts off me. As I commute to work, I am drafting this post.

7. I should not have discussed this whole fiasco with anybody, thinking that they would understand me or suggest any solution to deal with this anxiety.

Maybe the universe is plotting against me. But this is my fight. No point in expecting useless people around me to do anything, anything good at least.

I am not backing down, come what may. Give me some more to fight against. I strongly believe

When the going gets tough, the tough gets going. 

One good thing that came out of this episode is learnt to trust nobody, rely on nobody, DO NOT help anybody.

Just need to stick to my mantra “Be Practical”.