Being contactable

[Hyphen]

Completely unrelated to the railway (I don't know if the thread was meant to be!), but I work for a private healthcare organisation in IT.

As a senior member of my team, I have a clause in my contract that I am to remain contactable at all times possible in the event of a major systems outage or any adverse incident involving a 'life-critical' IT system (could be considered similar to 'safety-critical' on the railway). I'm not expected to remain in front of a PC to fix things (neither am I expected to remain sober) but I am expected to assess situations, apply fixes (where possible) and invoke our specific IT call escalation tree to report problems to our equipment suppliers (or BT, for example).

After having a bad experience in a previous position where lower levels of staff got hold of my personal mobile number, and felt no remorse about calling me at 6am to tell me they couldn't log on, I was very careful about agreeing to this clause. The number is only available to senior staff on-call at each of our facilities, who have been briefed about when to make a decision to call me, and with examples of what would and wouldn't be classed as an emergency.

In return for my employer getting this benefit, I've also been able to negotiate with my line manager that I get to take any travelling time to/from our facilities as 'down time', and there's no expectation for me to do any work on the train! Works nicest for me when I head to our NE Lincs facility (from Swansea) - that's basically two days written off there!

 

[33056]

I am sufficiently old enough to remember life without mobile phones but confess that I decided to get one soon after they became fairly mainstream in the mid 1990s and would not be without it now.

However, I am not sufficiently attached to it that it stays on at all times (usually gets switched off and always left downstairs when I am asleep) and it does sometimes get left at home if I am only going out for a short time. I find it handy to access e-mails on the phone but only look at them at times of my choosing and the same applies to being on-line; if there is free wi-fi I might make use of it, but am not bothered if there isn't.

Regarding being on-call, that is why I continue to do what I do, once I sign off and walk out of the door that is the end of work; though they can and do contact me occasionally which I don't mind as long as it doesn't become a habit!

 

[DelayRepay]

As a senior member of my team, I have a clause in my contract that I am to remain contactable at all times possible in the event of a major systems outage or any adverse incident involving a 'life-critical' IT system (could be considered similar to 'safety-critical' on the railway).

I have a similar clause - although I don't work in IT and nobody's life would be at risk if something went wrong...

I manage this by:

1) Telling my team to ring me from their mobiles rather than their desk phones, so I can see it's them calling (I'll always answer because they'll only call if they really need to)
2) Letting everyone else go to voicemail which tells them to leave a detailed message. If the message sounds urgent I'll ring back. If not I'll ignore them until the next day.

It is rather unfortunate that my company mobile is on O2, and the O2 reception in the village where I live is shockingly bad