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.
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 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'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.