One of the facets of my last job that I DO NOT miss was being on-call.  Basically on one week out of six I had to live with my phone waiting for someone to call with a network or server problem.  The calls almost always came near midnight or near 4am my time.  It really stank.  What was worse was that I was salaried so did not get paid any overtime for these late nights on the phone.  At least twice a year I would spend an entire weekend on the phone.  Literally.

One of the joys of leaving that job and starting my new job was not being on-call.  I actually have learned to forget my phone sometimes.  I went to church last week without my phone and didn’t panic once!   That all being said, our CIO announced this week that we would now have to be on-call.  (Booooo!)  But that we would be compensated for being on-call.  (Yaaaayyyy!)

Apparently if a county employee is on call, during the time that they are on-call they get paid 20% of their base hourly rate in addition to their normal pay.  If we actually have to call in and work on something then we get to charge 3 hours of overtime.  Awesome!  This is effectively a 6% raise in my pay.  Yeah, I’ll take it.