For the first weekend in a month I am not holding the pager, and I had genuinely forgotten what that feels like. No phone face-up on the kitchen counter. No flinch every time it buzzes with something that turns out to be a delivery text. Just a Saturday that belongs to me.
The strange thing about being on call is not the incidents, which are usually rare and brief. It is the low background hum of readiness. You do not start anything you cannot abandon in ninety seconds. You sit near the laptop. You drink a bit less than you'd like to on a Friday. It is a tax on attention that you stop noticing until the week you don't pay it.
So this morning I made coffee properly, sat down with a book that has nothing to do with computers, and read for two hours without once checking whether a graph had gone red. We are all stuck indoors at the moment anyway, but there is a difference between being indoors and being tethered.
I will be back on the rota next week and that is fine, it's part of the job and I don't begrudge it. But I am writing this down so that next time I am three days into a quiet shift wishing something would break just to relieve the boredom, I remember that the boredom is the good bit.