Eleven months retired and I still wake up at 3:12 am

For thirty-four years I carried some form of pager. First an actual pager, a Motorola thing on my belt that went off in the middle of my sister's wedding speeches in 1997 (a Novell server, naturally). Then a Nokia, then a BlackBerry, then whatever the company issued and the on-call app that screamed like a smoke alarm. I retired eleven months ago and I want to write down a few things nobody told me, because some of you are thirty and on call every fourth week and you will be where I am sooner than you think.

Your body keeps the rota

The biggest overnight batch at my last job kicked off at 3 am and, if it was going to fail, it failed at about ten past. For nearly a decade, if my phone went at night, it went at 3:12. I have not had a work phone for eleven months and I still wake at 3:12 most nights, lie there listening for a phone that is not going to ring, and then go back to sleep. My GP says it will fade. My wife says it is the least annoying thing about me, which I am choosing to take as a compliment.

Nobody rings, and that is the point, and it is still strange

The first month was wonderful. The second month I caught myself checking the status page of my old employer like a man driving past his ex's house. Everything was fine. Everything was fine without me, which is exactly what I spent my last two years working towards, and it still stung a little. I mention it because a lot of us tie our sense of being worth something to being the person who gets the call. Better to think about that before you are forced to.

The handover was the best work I did in my last two years

This is the practical bit. When I knew I was going, I spent the better part of eighteen months writing myself out of the job. Not glamorous. Here is what actually helped the people who took over, judging by how few times they rang me afterwards (twice, both in the first month):

• A runbook for every alert that had ever paged me, written as "what you will see, what it usually means, what to check first, when to wake someone else". If an alert did not deserve a runbook, it did not deserve to page anyone, and we deleted it. We deleted a lot.
• A list of the things only I knew. I kept a text file for a year and every time someone asked me something and I thought "nobody else knows that", it went in the file. The firewall rule for the payroll vendor. Why the backup job skips the third Sunday. Which certificate expires in March and who has the login to renew it. It ended up at 140 lines. Every one of them was a future outage.
• Doing the restores in front of them. Not describing them. We restored the finance database to a spare box with the two new people driving and me sitting on my hands. Four hours the first time, ninety minutes the third.
• Going on holiday properly, twice, before I left. Two weeks each, phone off, in a tent on Maria Island. Whatever broke while I was away went on the list above.

What I do now

I grow tomatoes, badly. I have a home lab in the spare room that is entirely my own fault: a little Proxmox box, a NAS, a Pi running Pi-hole, and a UPS that has seen more action than it ought to (Tasmanian wind and a long overhead line). Nobody pages me about any of it. When the NAS complained about a disk last month I replaced it on a Tuesday afternoon with a cup of tea, and I cannot explain to you how good that felt.

If you are on call this week: write down one thing only you know. Just one. Whoever inherits your pager will thank you.

Cheers, G.