That time I got tired of 2AM wake-up calls and decided I was not 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 are jolted awake at 2AM for the third night in a row to restart a service that clearly has commitment issues.
We were not 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.)
I Looked at the Data
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. (See the server restart notifier I built →) 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 across the whole team
- 📉Fewer tickets, lower alert fatigue
- 😊My manager was thrilled. The ghost of 2AM Chinmaya finally got to rest.
Pain is not a rite of passage. It is a signal for change.
But Here Is the Part I Did Not Expect
There was resistance. Not loud. Just polite shrugs. That subtle vibe of "Why fix what is not broken?"
"Because I like sleeping. And also, it is broken. We have just accepted it."
Sometimes, teams normalize pain because it is familiar. "That is just how it is" becomes the operating model. But I have never been good at pretending repetitive suffering is noble. It is just inefficient misery.
And that is the philosophy this experience gave me: you can be the person who says "We have 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 am lazy with uptime.
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