Have you ever had a job that required you to be on "standby"?

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So one of the duties of my job is to be on "standby" or "oncall" once every 6 weeks or so. You are not allowed to leave the county, you must always be reachable by your cell phone or pager they provide and you must respond immediately. I use the terms oncall and standby interchangeably here, although I feel it is actually standby since you basically have to go in immediately when they call.

Minimum callout is 2 hours, you get paid time and a half for your calls and double time on sundays. A call can be as little as 15 minutes, and I have had them last almost 10 hours, it depends. You get a company vehicle to drive while oncall but this is inconsequential to me since I live close to work, it doesn't really save me much.

The standby pay for being oncall independent of any calls you get is about 2 bucks an hour which is much better than the .50c an hour it was 10 years ago.

To say it is intrusive on your life is an understatement. So many holidays, birthdays, and christmasses I have been oncall. For example today I am on standby and its a beautiful day, however I cant enjoy it. I just want the week to be over with so I can get my life back.

I posted about leaving my job several years ago on here and a few months later my father was diagnosed with cancer and it was horrendous and consumed me. I was glad my employer was flexible at that time. Overall I like my job, except for one dum dum that I have to deal with constantly.

I guess Im just curious if anyone else has been oncall and hates it as much as I do. There are many reasons I wish to leave my job and the standby is near the top of the list. I sleep poorly while oncall, It puts me in a bad mood usually. You cant do anything, whenever you try to get to doing something, BAM the phone rings.

I also tell myself that I should just deal with it and shut up, but when something makes you so unhappy its hard to ignore it. Many of the other guys hate it as well, some tolerate it better.
 
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I'm in a similar position. I have to have my cell phone and computer with me at all times. Even when I go on vacation, I need to be reachable and able to fix issues.
 
Yes, and I hated it. I once paid a guy to take my week.
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Originally Posted by Yah-Tah-Hey
In power generation I was on standby 24/7. All of management was.


I will say I am basically on call and can be called in anytime 24/7/365, however its fairly rare that we have an issue where you get called in, and when you are not on paid standby you are not "required" to come in and you can leave the county and whatnot.

Every time I have been called in when not on standby I have come in except for a few times where I was out of state or far away.

Most of us can be depended on to come in an emergency situation regardless of our assigned standby week, Of course we have a few slugs that you cannot count on, the only one you are hurting is your coworkers in a situation such as that.
 
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IT guy supporting a 7x24 mfg operation; Close to 60, so getting tired of it.

No compensation; we have VPN so driving to the site(s) is extremely rare;

Got called on a Sunday night, i was not on call; they were doing testing and my system wasn't responding. They didn't give any heads up about testing They called the on call person but also called me since I am the SME for that system; dialed in and fixed the issue; I was in Western VA for my mother's funeral.

Mgmt was super apologetic; I carry my gear even when not on call; i'd rather be engaged if knowledgeable and fix the issue (when not on call) than have my coworkers struggles for hours.....

I will be afk at this point, eating mixed vegetables.

-T
 
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in my latter years as a tv master control operator. Hated it, though I worked it to my lifestyle.

In the golden years I worked 4x 10 hour shifts and there was always someone "on the board".

Then we got automation and laid everyone off except for me, one other guy (who became my boss
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) and a part-timer. I got switched to 5 days, 8 hours a day.

I invented a "dead air detector" that texted my phone, emailed me. General manager wiggled herself into being on the list, so she nagged us as well. I could log into the air server from home and finagle it. I'd tune the tv to whatever channel was dead and figure it out from my couch.
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The server programming was patchwork and it would randomly delete movies over the weekend. So every other weekend I was "on" and had to log in from home at 8-ish am and make sure the movies hadn't grown legs and walked. For this effort I got not an hour of overtime but I got released an hour early on a weekday of my choice. So I was working 7 days for 40 hours and no OT.

We got a snowstorm on Sunday that clobbered the satellite dishes and knocked us off the air. I drove in, in the dangerous storm, cleaned the dishes, and put 4 hours of OT on my time card, to force the issue that they need to figure out how they'll manually clear snow when nobody's minding the store. It was noticed.
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Now I have a union government job and am not subject to (near) wage theft shenanigans.
 
When I drove a truck hauling powder cement we were on call 24/7. Only time we were not on call was the 8 hrs after a shift. But they would still call and wake you up.

Hated that job.

The propane delivery job I had made us work 1 weekend a month in case a customer ran out of gas. That job was not too bad. Only had to go out a couple times a day and it was local.

I would only put a couple hundred gallons in the truck as to not weigh it down too much and only put 50 or so in the customers tank. Then top them off the next work day.


We got paid 16 hrs x2 to be on call that weekend and I really liked that job.
 
Yes, when I was the , "chief fixer of everything that could go wrong" in IT 20+ years ago. I learned a lot that has served me well since then, but it was majorly intrusive in everything I did. I was the guy who would get there at 4:00 in the morning and stay until midnight if needed. Pretty soon it was mostly on me, as the other people I worked with didn't care to work that hard and didn't care to learn deep and wide. I don't miss wondering how many times my pager or cell phone would ring and at what time any day.
 
I was on call every day for the last 15 months of my career, before retiring in 2005. On most of the times I got called out on nights or weekends, the incident was either minor or BS. The worst was one Fathers Day when I had just started kayaking near my home with my adult son, when I received a duty call about a suspicious package in the mail. It turned out to be corn meal. Yes, those days grinded my gears and helped accelerate my retirement plans.
 
There is blue collar standby and white collar standby.

On the white collar front, career wise its started when I hit VP Global sales at a fairly large public or private company you are essentially on call eternally.

CEO also creates an on call reality beyond that.



UD
 
My employer pays $300 per week (base) to be ‘On Call' even if they don't need you.

If they call you in you'll get an automatic 4 hours of OT..... even if it took 10 minutes to resolve problem and you have to leave home to reboot a server or replace a bad UPS.

Some people really like volunteering for On Call.
 
I am 24/7/365. Just the nature of my career. Doesn't bother me much at all, which is unusual because I tend to think/worry about stuff a lot. Mine does not include "not allowed to leave the county".

How often do you actually get called in? If a lot, then I understand your concern. For me it's rare, maybe 2 or 3 times a year. Although is "seems" that it always happens when I am out of town, LOL.

Farmers, especially ones with livestock, live with this their entire lives. Maybe consider some kind of counseling/training to better learn to deal with it.
 
I had a job years ago when I was on call. It rotated every 4 weeks. Got called in once on a Sunday for an alarm trip. Goofy driver tripped it. They never paid me a dime. I asked my supervisor when I didn't notice it in my pay. He said " be happy you have a job" Not to long after that, I moved on.
 
I have been on call , 24 / 7 , for many , many years . Not much any more .

Part of increased responsibility .

The job pays the bills . If you do not like it , look for another job .
 
Yes. Army Medical Laboratory and Blood Bank Tech, Vietnam. 12hr shift 6days a week on call 24/7. Worked all day and night during mass casualty events, no bonus, no time and a half ....just the standard 25 cents/hr.
 
Yeah, in the oil business, a terminal operator (this prob applies to chemical ind too) is on call as part of their job. Sometimes it was a rotating shift, like once a month (for that week) and sometimes it is just part of the job. For many years, starting in 1973, you did not get any special pay for it. It WAS the job and you just did it if you wanted to keep that job.

Sometime in the 1990's, a law was passed that required on call personnel to be compensated for the time spent being called in. This opened up a new world for some of the more unscrupulous employees which would find plenty of reasons to get called in. I know a guy that could make an extra weeks pay during his "On Call" week.

My point is, it's all in what you make of it.
 
when I was working on the rigs as a directional driller anytime you're home and not at the rig - you're on call. working as a coordinator I was essentially on call 24/7 - anytime of day and night guys at the rig would call me with any issues/questions. I didn't last long though, one year - thanks to recent global oil demand drop and crisis in US oil industry...
 
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