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Don't Do These 5 Things While On-Call

by Tony Albanese February 3, 2014 | 2 min read

Last week, we gave some suggestions for how you can spend your time when you are on-call. However, here are some things that you absolutely should not do while on-call.

Don’t Run Away from Civilization and Become Feral

feral girlWorking on screens all day can occasionally make you want to run into the woods and never look back. While experiencing nature on a hike or backpacking is a good idea, you should probably remain accessible to technology while on-call.

Either you don’t bring your phone with you to receive alerts or a PagerDuty alerts scares a Grizzly Bear and it attacks you. We really don’t want to feel responsible for that.

Don’t Go to a Justin Bieber Concert

Ops-Manager-at-Justin-Bieber-ConcertWhile there are many reasons not to see Justin Bieber live in concert, the plethora of teenage girls screaming may be the only thing powerful enough to drown out a PagerDuty alert. Even if you are using the Boom-Boom-Boom in my Pants Method to get alerts.

Don’t Go Anywhere Popcorn Comes to Life and Tells You to Shut Off Your Phone

Movie ThearterNo, we aren’t talking about doing illegal drugs. Although you probably shouldn’t do that either. It may be a good idea to stay away from cinemas or live theater because you will need to shut off your cell phone and lots can happen in a few hours. Unless, of course, you are one of those people who don’t shut off your phone. In that case, we hate you.

Don’t Get Crunked

PagerDuty Keg Tapping

Having a drink or two is probably okay. But you don’t want to end up writing a drunk text to your ex in your terminal and end up deploying it to your app. Not if you don’t want your GitHub Blame History to become an internet meme.

Don’t Stay in Your Office

All Hail HynotoadSeriously go out! Please, have a life. With PagerDuty you don’t need to feel tethered to your desk. We’ll let you know if something critical happens.

Just stay prepared. Keep your laptop in your backpack incase you need to whip it out and save the day.

Have you made the mistake of doing something distracting while on-call? What did you do? We may feature it in a future list.