60 On-Call Engineer Jokes Every SRE Has Lived

The phone rang at 3:07 a.m. The page resolved itself by 3:09. I lay awake until 6.

"How was your week on call?" I stared into a middle distance. They did not ask again.

I sleep with the laptop on the nightstand. This is normal now.

The on-call handoff: "Nothing's broken." Three minutes later: everything is broken.

I keep the volume at maximum. The cat has opinions about this.

"Are you on call this weekend?" Do not ask me that on a Thursday.

The page came in. I opened the laptop. The laptop needed updates. The updates needed a restart. The service self-healed before I logged in.

I declined the wedding. I was on call. They understood. They have not invited me to anything since.

"Why didn't you escalate?" I did. Nobody answered.

The runbook said: "Restart the service." It did not say which one.

On-call dinner plans: Whatever can be reheated.

The incident commander asked for an ETA. I said "soon." That was an hour ago.

"Did the page wake you?" No. The page kept me awake. The previous page woke me.

I packed for vacation. I packed the laptop too. My partner noticed. We had a discussion.

The rotation is one week. The nightmares are one quarter.

"It's not your fault." The sentence everyone says. Nobody believes.

I forgot to hand off. The pager forgot to remind me. I got paged for someone else's week.

"I'm at dinner." "Are you on call?" "…yes." "Then no, you are not at dinner."

The page came in during the school recital. I typed into a phone with one hand and clapped with the other.

Postmortem question one: "Was the on-call engineer awake?" Always the wrong opening question.

I have a Pavlovian flinch at the PagerDuty ringtone. I changed the ringtone. Now I flinch at the new one too.

The on-call week before vacation is a cursed object.

"Can you take a quick look?" It's never quick. It's never a look.

I learned more in my first on-call week than in six months of normal work. I do not recommend the curriculum.

The page resolved. The Slack thread continued for two hours. Nobody slept.

On-call rule: If you say "quiet week" out loud, you lose it.

I missed the page. The page was for a service I do not own. I got a stern note anyway.

"Did you read the runbook?" "The runbook is the one I am writing right now."

The escalation path was three people. Two were on PTO. One was me.

I learned to type on a phone keyboard while standing in a parking lot in the rain.

The dog has learned what the pager sound means. The dog leaves the room when it goes off.

"It's only a one-week rotation." It is one week. It feels like four.

On-call is a great way to discover all the documentation gaps you swore you'd fix last quarter.

The midnight page was for an alert someone added without testing. They added a comment: "Adjust threshold later." They added it last March.

"Can we move this incident to business hours?" We have asked the universe. The universe declined.

I tried to take a vacation day on my on-call week. The scheduler laughed in cron.

The bartender asked why I kept checking my phone. I told him. He poured me another for free.

My partner used to find the pager dramatic. Now they roll over and go back to sleep before I even answer.

"Was it a real incident?" "Define real."

The page fired. The metric had a typo. The service was fine. The sleep was not.

I closed my laptop at 4:42 a.m. The sun came up at 6:11 a.m. In between, I dreamt of YAML.

Every on-call engineer has the same three browser tabs open: the alert, the dashboard, and a doc that does not help.

"Are you on call?" "Always." "That's not how rotations work." "You have not seen my rotation."

Recovery time after a week on call: three weekends.

The incident channel had 47 people in it. Three were doing work.

I joined the bridge. Nobody was talking. Forty people were muted. This lasted nineteen minutes.

"You handled that well." I did not. I just stopped responding while it was still happening.

The on-call calendar is the only calendar I check more than once a day.

"It self-recovered." The phrase that should bring relief. It brings dread.

I keep a notebook on the nightstand. It is full of pages that start "3:14 a.m. — " and trail off.

Friday at 4:55 p.m. The page fires. The weekend begins as it means to continue.

The new hire said: "I look forward to being on call." We smiled. We said nothing.

Hour one of an incident: panic. Hour two: focus. Hour three: a kind of calm only sleep deprivation can provide.

"Why is the same person on call every week?" Because everyone else found a reason to skip the rotation.

The page came in on the way to the dentist. I sat in the chair, opened a terminal on my phone, and confirmed disaster between rinses.

Compensation for being on call: a small stipend. The stipend does not buy back the night.

The CTO asked how on-call was going. I said "fine." The CTO went back to whatever the CTO does at 11 a.m.

The runbook had 31 steps. The first step was "don't panic." I was already on step 14 of panic.

After a year on call, I can tell which alert is firing by the ringtone alone. This is a skill nobody should have.

"What's the worst on-call you've had?" Whichever one I'm on this week.