Friday, June 22, 2007

Some time ago (If my career were broken down along the same timeline as our total global history, we are talking about the time long after the Earth cooled, yet before the last mastodon was chased into a crevasse.) I was asked during a job interview if I minded wearing a cellphone for the purposes of being on-call.
I remember laughing and then confessing (I'm always honest in interviews) that I've worn something for that purpose for so long that sometimes I feel a vibration even when there is no ring -- Or even when I've left my phone in the car.
The interviewers laughed, too (it was a conference call) and first one and then the other admitted the same weird thing.
Then I saw this article and I started to realize how widespread this type of thing is.
I learned a while back to watch for signs of "vibroglaze" in people I'm speaking with. That happens when a silent cellphone goes off in their pocket, their head tilts gently to the left, and they nod at me (no longer listening) while they check the caller ID. This is even more amusing when they get a call in the middle of something they are saying, because even unanswered calls draw enough attention away to derail the train of thought.
"What was I saying?"
"You were saying that I need a raise."
"No. No I'm sure that wasn't it."
But "Phantom Vibration Syndrome"? That sounds like an actual disorder! And one that I clearly have!
Okay.
This weekend will be entirely devoured by a city-mandated electrical test of our building. It should take them several hours with the power off to . . . . Check the power thingy. Yeah, I don't know what they are doing. But I know that power will be off here from 6pm Saturday until 6am Sunday, which means a few hours before the lights go out we need to be up here gracefully powering down the servers in the specific order that makes them not wake up confused. Side note: I wish sometimes I could wake up not confused, but the question "Why is this stupid cat eating my hair?" spurs even more confusion. Maybe a timed coffee IV drip set to start an hour before my alarm goes off?
Then Sunday at crazy early o'clock, we all have to come back to the office to coax the datacenter back to life.
The bright side is that my phone should be totally silent while the servers are in their city-imposed hibernation. I'll probably still feel it vibrate.

Edit: Look!

2 comments:

Andrew Moore said...

Oh man ... I totally have this. And here I was, thinking I was being 'polite' by leaving my phone on stun. Maybe I should've left on the "Enter Sandman" ringtone.

tess said...

I never put my phone on silent... It's either on, with a purring kitten as the ring tone (it was the least obnoxious ring tone that came with the thing, not surprisingly because it sounds like a very loud version of having my phone on silent... Um. Yeah. How can silent be loud? You know what I mean.), or completely off.

Gotta love that pentagon story... Soooo reminds me of my office... *sigh*