It seems like some people are married to their job more than that they are married to their spouse. I see this often in my own job. I am required to carry a Blackberry handheld to be available for emergencies. I am receiving non-critical emails at often ridiculous late off-hours. Stuff that easily wait until next day - you receive an email at 1.00 AM in the morning. This is annoying when being on call as you get woken up for crap. I did test this with some of the worst “offenders” and emailed late Friday nights for stuff that is not even close to be worth looked at on a weekend. Still - within 30 minutes I got a reply. I replied again just for the heck of it and again and at an even more ridiculous late hour I got a reply.

Since I get woken up by this non-critical stuff I made it the rule that they need to call me if they want off-hour support. Filtering out the messages in our current environment and Blackberry/Lotus Notes implementation is just not working well at all. So, you want support - call. And better only call for mission critical stuff and not some stupid thing like rebooting a development server at midnight on a Saturday. It is not a passion of mine to reboot servers at midnight.

A co-worker told me a story where he left office on a Sunday (putting in some extra hours) just to find out the person in then neighboring cubicle died alone an hour later the same Sunday trying to catch up on work that she did not finish in the 80 hours of the week before. I love my work (kind of), but I do not consider it passion to work insane hours and then to die at work. I want to be remembered as a father and husband and not as the co-worker who died putting in extra hours on a weekend. Get a life.