Nice story buddy!

In my personal case, it was a time in my career, being a Sysadmin, I was always connected, even vacations or holidays, I was always carrying my Laptop, 3G - 4G connectivity, and first thing to look at for booking a hotel or apartment was “free WiFi”.

Nowadays, I don’t work as a Sysadmin, so that responsibility has gone for me, and since I became a Dad, I do look for places and activities for my 3 years old princess, then for the Wife, and finally, bars or Pubs with good and cold beer near by!.

cheers!

Oh yes...I do get away. Have to. That being said, even when I’m on vacay, though I mostly unplug, typically by the tail end of my vacay days, I may ‘work’. Though, I try to make it as minimal as possible. 

It is hard to unplug during vacation as I am one that I don’t want to come back to 1000+ emails to check my first day so I tend to use each day for a bit to go through and clean up.  

It is hard even without being on vacation to disconnect even on the weekends as I was called in for an intrusion issue in a DC and had to take some action on Veeam to send jobs for our management stack out to Wasabi.  Was fun but a long night.

Remember folks, a lot of my stories are humor. I had someone message me asking if I was worried about my boss reading this. Of course not. Remember corporate survival 101 always make fun of your bosses' boss so that your boss finds it funny. Also be sure to copy cat your bosses' complaints about their boss to your boss. Your boss will see that you are on the right team and treat you like family

@Chris.Childerhose eek! Hope you got it all sorted??

Things are still ongoing to rebuild the environment again and restore about 400 VMs back.  I had to work on sending MGMT backups for all our other sites out to Wasabi so we ensure nothing happens or if it does, we can restore but we cut off that site to our network immediately.  Lots of security work and rebuild going on today and the next few weeks I suspect.  The weekend was jammed packed.  

Yuk; such is the life of our work…. ‍♂️ 

Yep, and now, I am sending our ProtectedB (Government) sites to another form of backup with S3 to Tape today.  The fun never stops.  

Just remember there is an I in team.  It’s in the A-Hole.

And honestly, I don’t really take vacations all that often.  But I have a taken a couple, and have gotten calls during them.  But to be fair, I did save a client from a flood with a little bit of remote work on a mini-”staycation” (the flooding also changed my travel plans).  But for those rare instances of an actual vacation, my team (and boss) have done a good job of leaving me alone because they know I need to unplug.  We’ll see how things go when I’m out in November for 10 days.  The main thing is to make sure you have a good team that will support your mental health and a need to unplug.  Mine does a good job of that...if I get a phone call or email, it’s because something really bad has happened and I’m their only hope, but that’s few and far between.

100% this.

If I won the lottery, I’d invest my time in my family and my community, not in working more.

Everytime people bend over backwards and stop the problems going up the chain, it proves the chain strong enough that no change is required. The unfortunate truth is that your employer would hire for your position by the end of the week if you died, but your family would always miss you. So don’t let your family miss you in life too.

I keep a separate work mobile that goes off the moment I finish for the day and never comes with me on holiday etc. I have key work contacts on my personal number that I can notify if I’m sick/emergency situation etc, but that’s the way the relationship should be. If we can’t cope then we need to expand the team, not the employee’s hours.

I saw this a few years back, IT guy that is running the department in responsibility, but not in title or pay. He’s on holiday abroad. He gets a call that they’ve been hit by ransomware, he opts to return a week early to help fix it as they won’t stop calling him to ask questions. His kids miss a week of their dad, he doesn’t get a pay rise because they had to pay consultants to help so they’ve blown their budget. They don’t get to invest in tools or anything forward thinking for the same reasons. IT Guy got some annual leave back but no compensation towards their cancelled holiday. 3 months later they’re hit again. Everyone starts questioning the competency of the team because they just shut up and made do, knowing that nothing was going to change.

Sometimes the people up the chain need to sweat and be held responsible for these issues (staffing, budgeting) that cause the everyday Sysadmin the stress they’re feeling. 

That’s one thing I appreciate about my boss.  He understands family first.  There are days that work gets prioritized for me (I’m a bit of a workaholic), but when I’m not in, he’ll do everything he can to keep things off of me, even if I’m the last stop for things broken in our org.  But if that does happen, he’ll make it right.

I don’t think he knows where these forums are anyway. :D 

When on Vacation, I absolutely disconnect from work as much as I can. If you can’t disconnect while on vacation, did you really take any break? I don’t think management wants burnt out employees, even if they think they want someone willing to work 24x7x365.

I just had 10 days at the lake. I left the work phone at home. Didn’t check my email once.

That being said, I gave my manager (a few levels up) my personal cell for EMERGENCYS only. (Ransomware, Building on fire, SAN down, Etc) If SRM is required or a full restore I may get a call.

I told him I still might not be able to get ahold of, but if I was sitting around doing nothing I’d remote in or call and at least be able to give some advice. (and get paid a ton of overtime lol)

Lucky for me my coworkers handle most of it, but being a senior guy, there are a few things I’d rather them call me for than guess and make worse. I’ve gotten things to a point they are stable when I leave for a few weeks.

Unfortunately I’m looking to deal with 500 emails on Monday (which I haven't opened a single one this vacation )  The ol punishment for taking time off haha. 

I can identify with this….I would generally rather take things on during my time off than have it be worse, everyone is affected, and then I still have to clean up when I get back.  And yeah...those 500ish email don’t help, but when you’re knee deep in some sort of major issue, then emails pile up and have to wait making it all even worse.

I’m a master of multitasking, but am only being paid for 1 job. I often need to remind myself that. I used to want to get everything done ASAP to make everyone happy.  I still do, but working sev1 support calls for years at IBM with down customers taught me to take a breath and never get stressed or panic.  It takes years to get to this level of multitasking, prioritizing, and putting the minor stuff to the back of the queue without being stressed about it. (That small stuff sometimes sits for a LONG time which is what used to drive me crazy) I see IT burnout often for this reason.  Veeam is actually one of the things that make me feel less stressed knowing when people cause mistakes I can undo them easy :)

I can identify with that one too.  As a storm spotter, I’m actually the central hub for our area for radio communications between my spotters in the field, the local NWS WFO (National Weather Service Weather Forecast Office), and local Emergency Management Agency.  There’s no time to get frazzled or confused or panicky. 

I think that carried over a bit to my work as well.  At my previous job, my first night on-call, we had a contractor in terminating fiber in the datacenter, and they bumped a cable on one of our Cisco Nexus 7k core switches.  That cable was in partially, and when batch jobs and backups started up in the middle of the night and we increased the load on the network.  This exacerbated an issue where the port was flapping due to the bad connection.  However, it going up and down was creating havoc with the failover connection.  This cause roughly half of the virtual servers in our hosted environment to go offline across all customers.  I worked with our Command Center to spin up a war room call and get our on-call network engineer on the line with a couple of other folks, and called my boss to get him on it.  When I called him, he wasn’t very awake on account of it being something like 2AM, and couldn’t believe his ears as I very calmly told him that we were having a major outage and about half of our environment was offline.  He just wasn’t prepared for that calm and collected report….

I’d sometimes have 2 sites down in towns 2+ hours apart from each other, and have to get or fly in parts etc.  I sure don’t miss the 24 hour shifts I used to pull.  

Back to the original topic, I see reddit posts about this often, guys not getting paid for OT, working weekends, holidays, getting 0 vacation etc.  It’s easy to burn out in this industry now. 

I lucked out with a 7:30-3:30 M-F job, every holiday off and only overtime if I choose to work it.  (I still get the odd phone call, but I don’t mind one here and there. I used to work 300+ hours OT a year at IBM)

My time > company time.