(no subject)

I've locked the previous entries. While I appreciate the responses I found they really weren't a positive for me, at least not at this point in time (and the attraction of MRA responses elsewhere really didn't help - "reverse sexism" and all...if only I had that kind of privilege and power in my life!)

I'm in a place where I'm comfortable with my life, really being so for the first time in over three decades, and I think I need to focus more on enjoying that.

Work on-call changes.

So my employer has decided an expense to cut is mobile phones assigned to individuals. They adopted a stipend policy of $35/month + $35/month if it's a data-plan device (smart phone, etc.) They then became very strict about that such that, generally speaking, senior management kept theirs but nobody below the AVC level did. Personally, that's no matter as I was going to refuse the stipend due to the public-/open-records/FOIA aspects of it - I'm not interested in having my mobile records be subject to public inspection in that way and for so many years (I'd have to maintain the records and make them available within 3 days of any request for as long as four years, including within that amount of time after the end of my employment here...)

In my department of seven people (including the boss) there were five smartphones assigned to people (I was one of the two people who never had one assigned.) All but two of these were turned in last week. Those two, both iPhones, were given new numbers and are now the primary and back-up on call devices. The pagers have been turned in and that service discontinued.

So far, I'm not exactly seeing much benefit to this plan. The only one I do see is not having to use our personal mobile devices to call in response to pages. However, the negatives strike me as larger, mostly the much lower charge life and the odds of the charging cable being lost/misplaced/left at the office when departing on Friday evening - I'm betting I'm eventually going to do this since there is only one charging cable per phone and I have no extras at home since everything I have uses either mini- or micro-USB.

Further, since the phones are not on plans with AT&T that include tethering or hotspot we can't used them with our laptops when on call and not near a data connection, which means the more rapid response claim simply isn't.

While the pagers were low and old tech, they were reliable, durable, and had great battery life - pop an AA-cell battery in every 1-2 months and they were good to go. And my experiences with paging to SMS, particularly on AT&T, are not remotely good - no pages delivered at the time of an incident then they were delivered hours to days after the fact, producing several consecutive sleepless nights.