On call

Well, it seems that the subject of on call has been raised at Alstom.

Each 12 hours rotation is worth:
£20.60 for weekdays
£25.75 for weekends
and £30.90 for statutory holiday.

(so £206 per full week)

+ 1.25x salary if called (assuming 2 hours minimum payment, 3 if between 23:00 and 06:00)
1.5x salary at the weekend.

If called out between 11pm and 6am then you get time in lieu for the next day.

Will be provided with mobile, laptop and "quite possibly" broadband (eg. some people at the moment have broadband paid for).

This is for a 1 hour response, ideally 30 minutes to get on site. Oh and obviously 'in a fit state to work'. Which means I'd either have to swap 'on call' on friday with someone else, or drive to the pub.

So, for those who actually are victims of on call rotas, does this seem reasonable.

Wierdness

This is _really_ weird.

Since yesterday we've had network problems.

But not of the 'nothing can communicate on the network'. Nor 'machines plugged into a particular network segment are unreachable'.

Nope. We've had a _few_ machines unable to reach _some_ parts of the network.

Most noticable when these are servers of course.

First incident, was on our vmware server - workstations couldn't communicate with the DHCP server that's running on there. Either to get DHCP addresses, or to just ping it or whatever.

Another machine though, on the SAME network, sharing the SAME interface was fine. And this machine could also communicate freely with our DHCP server.

As far as we could tell, packets to/from this machine weren't leaving the network switch it was plugged into. Where an almost identical machine, on the same physical hardware had no problems.

Ok, we sorted that by re-cabling that port into another switch. Only to come in this morning, and find that that wasn't the only culprit. Several machines, on COMPLETELY DIFFERENT network switches were exhibiting the same problem. One or two workstations in different areas of the site, and a couple of servers.

Very wierd. Reconnecting them to another physical switch in the same logical unit seemed to resolve the problem though.

Still don't know what the problem is mind you, but at least we now know what's happening, and how to stop it from doing so.

Damn, I'm looking forward to the pub tonight.

(incidentally: PUB TONIGHT. BEER ENGINE. 7ish. Don't bring a supersoaker)

Time and attendance

Just noticed that in terms of extra time booked this week, I've got 311 minutes.
Which given that I've used 8 minutes of that this morning, still means that technically, I should be going home at around 10am.

The really sad part is that I had a day off on Monday, and still have done a 35 or so out of a 37.5 hour working week.

See, that's how sad^Wdedicated I am.

The BOFH excuse server

In order to install excuse server on your system:
( Cut because of formatting problems )