Early Wakeup Call
It’s funny how something you don’t think is very interesting to yourself turns out to be for someone else. This morning is a good example of that. I didn’t think much of it but when I mentioned it to my roommate, he thought it was pretty weird. The story is true and while I guarantee it isn’t as exciting as you might be thinking, it was curious. I’ll give it that.
I didn’t do much this weekend. Every couple of weeks, I am on call for work. If you’ve ever had a job where you were on call, you know what it is like. You wait for a phone call that may never come. Several years ago, being chained to that company-supplied cell phone really made me feel like a prisoner. I never went anywhere I couldn’t get access to the Internet. As years have gone by, I’ve realized that as long as you can answer that phone and get back to fix the problem in a reasonable amount of time (or have a colleague take care of it for you), you can still have a life.
This week, I am on call. As of writing, my on call sentence will end at midnight tonight. Knock on wood, it’s been pretty quiet. I figured if any call was going to come, it would be Thursday night while I was at a dinner party with friends. I had backup. If I got a call, I had someone in my group who was willing to take a look at it for me. Turns out, I never did get a call that night. Or Friday. No call on Friday was a good thing. I had been out late on Thursday and didn’t get much sleep after I got home. Friday was a trying day at the office because I was beat. I went to bed before 10PM that night.
I felt great on Saturday morning and figured I had been in something not unlike a coma. As I stretched, I reached for my iPhone to check my mail, alerts, and whatever else pops up overnight. The iPhone is my first peek at the world each day. Reaching for the device is always the very first thing I do. No exception. The second thing I did was look at my work phone. I slept deep enough that if it rang overnight I was sure to have missed the call. Nothing. This was a good thing. My worst fear about missing a phone call from work isn’t so much that I missed it. It is the thought that one of my colleagues will get a call in the middle of the night because I didn’t answer. No one likes getting up at three in the morning. I certainly don’t want to be the cause of that scenario.
Saturday, yesterday, was pretty uneventful. The work phone never rang and I spent the day relaxing, watching some classic Lost episodes, and reading. For the curious ones, I have been reading Stephen King’s “Everything’s Eventual”. It is a book of short stories I highly recommend. If Mr. King were to read this right now, he’d probably tell me I was rambling and to get on with it, much like you are right now, so I will.
I went to bed last night a little after midnight. A typical weekend morning for me begins around 9AM. This is when my biological alarm clock typically begins to ring. Today, however, I did not wake up at 9AM. In fact, I woke up far before then. I woke up around 6AM. I immediately decided that this was too early and I refused to begin my ritual of the day by reaching for my iPhone. I did my best to slide back into dreamland but I just couldn’t. Something didn’t feel right. That’s when I looked over at my on call phone. Did it ring in place of my internal alarm clock and I didn’t recognize the difference? I broke the ritual and reached for the not-iPhone first.
It was off. The blasted on call phone wasn’t even turned on. The battery must have exhausted overnight not unlike me the previous night. My assumption was confirmed when I turned the phone on. It did manage to boot but gave me a “LOW BATTERY” warning. I realized this was my one chance to forward the number to my iPhone. This way, if I do get called, no one will get a voice mail greeting. As I did this, I started to wonder how long it was off and, more importantly, if someone had called. There was no way I could have luck that bad. The phone didn’t have enough to juice to do much more than forward that number before dying so I decided to check my email at work. I logged in and sure enough, there it was. After an entire Saturday of radio silence, here’s a string of emails from the past hour. I skimmed them quickly and found that the problem had first been handled by another department. My department was to look into the problem next but since it wasn’t critical at that moment, the on call person (me) was going to be called at 7AM to take a look. I glanced at the clock in the upper right corner of my computer. 6:45AM.
I quickly fired off an email stating I was looking into the problem and got the necessary work done. It turns out that it wasn’t all that critical but if I hadn’t woken up hours earlier than usual, my phone never would have rang, someone else would have been called, and my worst on call fear would have come true.
As I said at the beginning, I didn’t think much of it, but when my roommate emerged from his bedroom and was heading out the door for work, I asked him to call my on call phone to make sure the call forwarding kicked in before the battery died once again. To my delight, my iPhone rang instead. When I told him the story I just told you, he found it to be pretty weird. I suppose maybe it is. At the very least, I enjoyed telling it and if you enjoyed reading it, I think that’s all that matters.
