This bank’s applications automatically generate text pages with error messages whenever problems occurr, reports an IT pilot fish who’s part of the carry-a-pager rotation.

“You were expected to respond to a page within two hours,” says fish. “You weren’t necessarily chained to your home computer, and while pages were uncommon, you still had to provide a reasonable level of support.

“One Sunday, I drove out to our vacation house, about 75 minutes from our home. I chose Sunday to do this because none of our application batch scripts ran on Sunday, so it was extremely unlikely there would be a page.”

But when fish gets to the vacation place, that’s suddenly the last thing on his mind.

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