I handed the pager over on Friday afternoon and I have not thought about it since. This is, it turns out, the whole point of handing the pager over, and yet it still feels faintly miraculous every time.
There is a particular tension that lives in the back of your skull during an on-call week. You do not notice it while it is there. You notice it leaving. You sit down on a Saturday morning with a coffee, reach for a book rather than a laptop, and somewhere around the second cup you realise you have not checked your phone in two hours and nothing bad happened as a result. The world kept turning. Some other poor soul is watching the dashboards and, with any luck, they too are watching nothing happen.
I did not do anything remarkable. I read most of a novel, went for a walk that had no purpose, and cooked something that took longer than it needed to because I felt like it. I did not optimise my weekend. That was the optimisation.
The job is good and I like it. But the best part of carrying the pager is the weekend after you put it down, when the quiet stops feeling like the calm before something and just gets to be quiet.