Excellent slashdot "articles" on this very thing:
http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/04/27/1946245
http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=11917&cid=255567 <- I kinda
like this one
My $.0000002 below
We had a special email address "emergency@" that customers were told
was to be used in emergency only situations. It was up to the tech
with the on-call duty to take the call or to simply reply that the
issue emailed would be taken care of during normal business hours.
Some customers got it, others did not and took some training to get
it right.
When I worked "on-call" we made sure that the pager given to us was
leased with a instant "spare in the air" insurance replacement
policy. It was amazing how often that thing was dropped off
overpasses, dropped horizontally through walls, drown in lakes and
even, dropped in a garbage disposal.... "accidentally", we must have
replaced it 15 times in the time I worked there.
It is also very important that there be an esprit de corp among your
staff. So if you want to sneak away from the pager for a movie with
your honey, someone else who might not necessarily be on-call is
willing help you when you receive a page while you are in the movie.
We also allowed the pager duty person some extra slack when it came
to coming in early the next morning. The text based pager was
important as you could see how bad the weekend was from the inbox of
the pager on our IMAP server.
It is also important that the _boss_ take on-call duties when it is
appropriate. I may not like some of my former managers but one of
them was great by always surprising whom-ever had pager duty on a
holiday/anniversary/any-day by taking the pager. Of course, we all
chipped in when he had the pager as he lived an hour from where we
worked. BTW, when a cranky customer hits that pager with some whiney
non emergency request and the CTO of the company calls him back,
well, let's just say that whiney customer stopped doing that... :)
Eventually taking the on-call rotation became a pretty big burden so
the company hired a super-slacker-pot-head to simply sleep on a couch
in the office and respond to the pager. If the page was a simple
reboot-this-device-for-this-customer then he would go do the reboot-
monkey thing. If it was anything more in-depth, he would call the
appropriate person responsible for that system and either be remote
hands or hand off the issue. All of his outgoing emails were canned
and he generally was told to NOT directly communicate with customers.
Having him basically sleep there but not really have any maintenance
responsibilities was great for us as he was able to provide an
outsiders view of what was causing the most pain. He left great
emails for us with "hey, this system is pretty much borked, if you
fixed it, then I could sleep more!"
Some of my geek friends working for The DiG, Amazon and MSFT are
given broadband adapters for their laptops so they can remote in from
the park etc while on pager duty.
With all that being said, we paid $100 a week for taking "the
rag", :) a red two-way pager shared between the four of us.
I hope this helps,
ryan
On Nov 13, 2007, at 6:40 PM, Mark Nash wrote:
We are wanting to have people be on-call in case of emergencies and
for telephone tech support at night & on weekends. How do you pay
your people for on-call time where they are doing nothing, and how
do you then pay them when they work during those time periods?
Are there employment rules on this?
Mark Nash
UnwiredOnline
350 Holly Street
Junction City, OR 97448
http://www.uwol.net
541-998-5555
541-998-5599 fax
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