Until Monday morning, I had the dubious honor of having had the ugliest on-call week, in relation of number of ‘all hands on deck’ critical issues, on my team. That number was 12, set in 2009. I still maintain I had the ugliest in general because a couple of those were incredibly nasty, and it happened to occur on the week I turned 30 for extra insult to injury.

Monday, one of our new guys beat me and is at 13, before going off-call Tuesday. The current on-call guy is at 5 already, which is a good start. He’s eager to take the record.

I’m wondering if my wearing of that mantle as a badge of honor might have sparked a potentially bad trend. Sure, most of the incidents don’t actually relate to our team these days, but that doesn’t mean someone who’s desperate for that one last problem to push him over the top won’t consider shutting down a database server to cause a disaster.

And what if people turn to performance enhancing drugs and starts sending bottles of Whiskey down to the networking guys?