Having put crying infants back to sleep repeatedly in the night, and having dealt with five alarm £1000 per second outages, I can assure you, babies are much less stressful.
Does amuse me that the wife can sleep through earthquakes, but I'm trained to wake to full alertness at a pindrop, if a pindrop is the scramble signal.
Does one ever lose the on-call instinct? I was on for eight years solid, and have been off the pager for five, but it's still there. If I hear someone's phone go with the alert sound I used to use, I still flinch.
That instant-fear reaction to common stimuli is a symptom of PTSD, and is the reason that I flat-out refused pager duty after the first ~6 months. This system should be considered a workplace hazard; it has a measurable detrimental effect on employee health, and not all employees recover afterwards, as you and I are discovering for ourselves.
Systems like pager duty should be reserved for temporary crises, and should only notify people during their work hours. If a company can't afford three emergency-ops people, then they are probably overestimating the cost of downtime. If the company expects more than one incident per year, then they have a QA problem, not an ops problem.
I tried chatting to my doctor about a referral for something to help me sleep and stop having anxiety attacks that'd make me vomit for weeks and lose 20lbs at a time a few years back - he was adamant that PTSD only comes from warzones, and that working with computers cannot possibly be stressful, try being a doctor, you bloody millennials know nothing about stress try working for a living stop wasting my time.
I ultimately left my business, and haven't stopped travelling (running away) in a year. From what I gather my non-technical cofounder is finding things hard since my departure - good - serves him right for putting the golden goose in a battery cage and giving it shock therapy for a decade.
I spent time in a war zone and recall the sounds of mortar/rockets making impact, or the warning sirens (if they worked) wailing up to a distinct burbled scream.
I've been on-call with a large tech firm since I returned. The sensation felt in that first moment of processing the leading notes of a sound is indistinguishable between a pager and an incoming round.
Does amuse me that the wife can sleep through earthquakes, but I'm trained to wake to full alertness at a pindrop, if a pindrop is the scramble signal.
Does one ever lose the on-call instinct? I was on for eight years solid, and have been off the pager for five, but it's still there. If I hear someone's phone go with the alert sound I used to use, I still flinch.