The Pain You Ignore Becomes the Job You Hate

AKA: That time I got tired of 2AM wake-up calls and decided I wasn’t going to take it anymore.

At Apex Analytix, I was part of the on-call rotation — one week out of every 10 or 12. Reasonable on paper, until you’re jolted awake at 2AM for the third night in a row to restart a service that clearly has commitment issues.

We weren’t dealing with new problems. We were dealing with old problems wearing new timestamps. Most nights, it was:

“Restart the server.”
“Restart the database.”
“Why are we even here?” (Just me asking this one.)

After one particularly groggy week, I did something wild — I looked at the data. Turns out, we were solving the same handful of issues every time. Four or five recurring root causes, four or five predictable fixes.

So I built scripts. I set up automation to restart services, dump logs to S3, and alert the right dashboards. By morning, the only job left for the on-call engineer was drinking coffee and reviewing the logs — not fighting fires in their pajamas.

The results? Better sleep. Fewer tickets. Happier team. My manager was thrilled. The ghost of 2AM Chinmaya finally got to rest.

But Here’s the Part I Didn’t Expect…

There was resistance. Not loud. Just… polite shrugs. That subtle vibe of “Why fix what isn’t broken?”

“Because I like sleeping. And also, it is broken — we’ve just accepted it.”

Sometimes, teams normalize pain because it’s familiar. “That’s just how it is” becomes the operating model. But I’ve never been good at pretending repetitive suffering is noble. It’s just… inefficient misery.

And that’s the philosophy this experience gave me:

Pain is not a rite of passage. It’s a signal, of need for change.

You can be the person who says, “We’ve always done it this way.” Or you can be the one who asks, “Should we still be?” I try to be the latter. Ideally, without losing REM sleep in the process.

And if that makes me sound lazy, fine. But at least I’m lazy with uptime.