I wasn't on call this weekend, and it took me until about Saturday lunchtime to actually believe it. That's the bit they don't tell you about being on rotation: even when you're good at it, even when the pages are rare, some part of your brain stays on a low hum the whole time, half-listening for a phone that mostly stays quiet. And when the rotation finally passes to someone else, that hum doesn't switch off cleanly. It fades, slowly, over a day or so, and you only notice it's gone by its absence.
So Saturday morning I kept doing the small unconscious things. Checking the phone was charged and not on silent. Sitting near it. Not starting anything I couldn't drop in five minutes. It was only when I caught myself deciding not to go for a proper walk, on the grounds that I might be needed, that I realised nobody needed me. Someone else had the pager. The walk was allowed.
I went for the walk. It was excellent. Nothing happened, which was the entire point.
The thing I keep coming back to is how much of the cost of on-call is invisible, even to the person paying it. It isn't the 3am page, dramatic as that is. The 3am page is rare and you recover from it. The real cost is the steady tax on every quiet hour for the week you're holding the pager, the slight reservation you put on your own time, the plans you don't quite make. You stop noticing you're doing it. It just becomes the texture of that week.
I'm not anti on-call. Someone has to hold the thing, and a system you run is a system you should be willing to be woken by; that's a fair deal. But weekends like this one are a useful reminder of what the off weeks are supposed to feel like, and a nudge to make sure the rotation is wide enough that the off weeks genuinely outnumber the on ones. If you're carrying the pager every other week, you never fully come down from it. The hum never quite leaves.
This weekend it left. I read most of a book, made a slow lunch on Sunday with no eye on the clock, and at no point did I check whether a deploy had gone out. By Sunday evening I'd forgotten what the on-call dashboard even looks like, which is exactly how it should be. Monday it's someone else's turn to remember, and bless them for it. I'll take the walk while I can.