24/7 Accessibility: Redefining the Work Week

12:05AM. The phone rings. At that hour of the morning I’m expecting a family member needs a ride to the emergency room, or worse…there’s been a terrible accident and I’m needed for positive identification.

“It’s for you,” my husband says wearily. “Work.”

“I tried to call [X] and [Y] (names withheld for my sustained employment) and it went straight to phone mail. I got [Z] but he’s out of town…” The voice was apologetic, seemingly unconcerned that he, too, had been jolted from the warm, comfortable folds of what was formerly known as the weekend – that time of respite from all things work related. Not to mention the witching hour when decent society rolls up the sidewalks.

The call this morning was not the only one I received during the weekend. In turn, I had to call another programmer during his child’s cheerleading competition. I groaned and hated to do it (and I did tell him to wait until the competition was over to go to the office) but a client was in need.

Yet I can’t say I’m all that surprised any more. A couple of years ago I spent Easter Sunday (dressed in a conspicuous pastel suit) at the Detention Center trying to recover a SQL Server database that chose an inopportune time to heave its last breath. This year I got the call at 10:00AM on Thanksgiving morning, when all the burners on the stove were working at full capacity in preparation for the traditional family feast.

Recently a fellow programmer was in Costa Rica with his wife for two weeks, but he still checked email and corresponded with the office, just in case something came up with the tax applications (his specialty).

But what time is purely family time? When can an IT person walk out the door and know that a block of contiguous hours without work concerns begins?

At the conference I attended recently, the keynote speaker talked proudly about “next generation wireless” and the notion of total immersion and constant access to employees. Yes, that’s probably great for the organization, but it does seem to raise a question of ethics where the employee is concerned. In my case, I’m an “exempt” employee, which means I am privileged to work for the organization in a “whatever it takes” capacity, with no overtime pay. I understand that some organizations offer employees something of pager stipend to compensate for being put on an electronic leash.

Mind you, despite the experiences I described here, I realize that in the scheme of things I am called rarely compared to some IT workers I know, whose pagers fill up before they can even respond to all the calls. One programmer I know who moonlights in ministry was paged while in the pulpit.

There is one thing certain: the threat of after-hours calls is powerful incentive to bulletproof applications, establish a service level agreement with clients, cross-train staff to level out the burden, and build in contingency plans. Yet, I continue to be amazed that operations handled entirely by paper for 100 years or more come to a grinding halt if they have to revert to paper for a weekend.