Shock Treatment for the Soul

There are times when I wonder whether I should make a career change. This weekend happened to be one of those times. Don't get me wrong, I have a pretty good job and the best part about it is the flex hours I can work so that I can go to all of the Diamondbacks games. There are trade-offs like everything else. In my case, I have to be on call every nine weeks. What this means is that I get paged whenever there is a problem with a server at work. This duty manager goes on for a week straight. In the off season, having the duty manager is bearable. After all, it does not interfere with baseball so I can live with being on call 24 hours a day for 7 days. But when spring training rolls around or worse, the regular season, it can be almost more than a guy can handle. Today happened to be one of those days. I had plans on going over to Mesa to watch the Diamondbacks play the Chicago Cubs in a split squad game. Just as I was about to leave, I was paged telling me of a potential server problem. I set all of my gear down and went to the computer to begin testing and troubleshooting. While I was doing this, I listened to the game on the Internet again. At about the third inning, I had the problems solved and ran to the television. The game was being televised on WGN in Chicago and I quickly set the satellite to that transponder to see the game. There I witnessed the Diamondbacks get taken to school by the cubs. The strange part was it seemed my duty manager pager and the Cubs were somehow in-sync. It seemed each time the Cubs scored, my pager would vibrate. In the 7 run seventh inning, I began to feel much like a white lab rat. By the end of the game, I had been trained much like Pavlow's dog. Each time my pager went off I assumed the Cubs had scored. Worse yet, each time the Cubs scored I felt a vibration on my waist. This would not have worried me so much but I had set the pager on the desk 3 innings ago. Make a note to self, leave pager home during next game.