EOSM is upon us soon.

Sorry about the lateness of this post, but I completely forgot how close
this is - 18th and 19th August, yes folks, only a few weeks away. The
date has been moved forward to coincide with Mike the Landlord's
birthday, as he wanted to share it with us.

I'm pretty sure everyone knows what goes on at these events, but for
those who don't I'll be writing a new invite for you this evening.

As usual I need to know who is attending at meal times so Mu can cater
for everyone. Could you please email eosm at speedyspic dot co dot uk
with however many will in your party. Usual rules, no ugly people, no
bringing your own booze and no cunts.

Eyethangewe.

 

mememememememememe. Also emailed.

 

Surely it's:

Saturday 19th August & Sunday 20th August?

 

BGN says...

You are of course correct.

The dates I had written down were the nights I have my room booked for.

 

Which room is that?

 

Muck says...

My girlfriend will be there to fend him off.

 

BGN says...

Room 1. It locks from the inside, with you on the outside.

 

<sigh>

I've gone and booked The Other Half of Scraggy's 'family room' (Hello
Scraggy, we are now family) for the night of the 19th. This is for
The Green at Hulland B&B.

<http://www.thegreenathulland.co.uk/>

The nice lady says that if I'm not going to have brekkie on the 20th
she'll give me a packed lunch to take home (aww).

She also confirms that they have just one double room left now.

Cost me £27.

 

Well that's inconsiderate of him. I won't have a new bike by then and
I'll be away racing in Wales.

 

Oh dear what a shame nevermind.

 

Jeez. What a gay meme.

 

No can do I'm afraid.


There, that should bring them flocking.

 

Ah. I was actually considering coming along to this, but I'm on call
that week.

 

That should thin it out.

 

I am, sort of; there are only 3 IT people in the London office more
senior than I am, and they're all part of the on-call escalation
process too.

This isn't technical support on-call - my responsibility is "very
serious incident coordination" on-call (4th-line shit-has-hit-the-fan
stuff), and it's not all the time.

I'll only ever get called if the comms room blows up or something, and
even then, my on-call responsibilities only really include phoning
people in Paris in the middle of the night and telling them to get
their arses down to the office (or more likely) to the DR facility.

I've been doing it since November last year, with no calls so far, so
basically it's just an additional 8K/year or so to have my work mobile
with me 24/7, one week in three.

 

I did exactly the same thing, and it was shit, as with over 50 customers
and several thousand servers in our datacentre there was at least one
escalation a week.

Plus the on-call allowance was pocket change.

Thanksfully it's now 'someone else's problem', thanks to an internal re-
org.

 

You accent isn't what I'd want to hear on the phone talking about bombs!

 

as I said, I haven't had one call in 9 months. For a start, it's only
for priority-1 applications, not every bloody server (we have
thousands too) Also, even if a single P1 server or application goes
down, I won't be called - if the 24/7 command centre staff can't swap
out for the cold standby hardware, then they'll call the on-call
application services support people, who'll come in and sort it.
Really, I'll only get called if something Really Bad happens.

well, it works out about 450 quid/month after tax for me, so it pays
some of my booze bill...

 

That's got "go to the EOSM anyway, and just ride back to London as fast
as you can if it goes pear-shaped" written all over it, I'd have
thought ...

 

"temping fate" comes to mind.

In theory, I'm not supposed to go further than 30 minutes from the
office when I'm on call - when I mentioned to my manager that even
during the day I'm 45 minutes away he just shrugged.

There are *some* upsides of working for the French.