[notacoward]

I was on as many as three on-call rotations for a few years. One had only two people for a while, so I was on every other week. The two things I most remember are:

* Arranging my whole life around on-call requirements. Bringing my laptop and backpack every time I went out. Designing new running routes that would use every street in a neighborhood and keep me close to home so I could respond within a 15-minute window. And yeah, the drinking thing. It pervaded my life in many ways I hadn't expected.

* Time zones and geography. These were always problematic, but especially during on-call. Often I'd narrow a problem down to a particular component that I didn't know well, so I'd try to contact the sub-team responsible for it, but nobody would respond. Then I'd try to turn the right knobs myself, and as often as not get yelled at for it in the morning. No, my afternoon, because my coworkers were three hours behind and late-commuters to boot. Of course they'd never hesitate to schedule meetings or ping me for trivial things well after my dinner.

I had taken the job, initially working on a project for which I was already a maintainer, because I wanted to avoid becoming an "architecture astronaut" by getting closer to operational reality. Indeed, I did learn a lot about how my own code behaved in real life. I don't have a problem with on-call requirements in and of themselves, but the way people and organizations handle the details is kind of <vomit emoji>.