The Standby

I have been customer service engineer for 9 years now and the hardest part of the day is always when your colleague  walked on to you (you can feel it from a distance the sound of the footstep..boom! boom! – similar to the Jurassic Park dinasour is coming scene! ) and hand on to you the standby phone. Arghhhhh!! Why me??
It is an old Nokia model mobile maybe most of us last seen something like 5 years ago.
First thing what I did when I got it was,  go to the "Call Divert" menu and change it to my number — turned it off and keep it inside my bag – thats why nobody cares to ask for a new phone -the functions used are so limited! 
So  there it goes, the scary part of job started. STANDBY time!
Why it is scary? I might be exaggerating but being on standby means that you’re responsible for any emergency case at any time of the hour, day and night , period.You can’t go outside town and have to be close to the phone at all time. Most important is to be mentally prepared if the customer call at 3am telling you the whole system is not working and found out later there was nothing wrong except  his network cable was loose! #$%%%!!

What can be done? Other than tuning my mind into the "alert mode"    I spent one extra  hour, before leaving home to check our system. All processes are running , no alerting filesystem issue, oracle archive logs are not full, cluster is stable and many others. I just have to make sure everything is perfect (almost!)  so that I can have a descent sleep tonight! God Help me!

p/s Just a minute after completing this posting I have an emergency call and its 5.30am in the morning !