eh, the stress of pager depends a whole lot on how often it goes off; I've had people that could take pager for the last two years, and haven't put them on it. I take pains to see to it that the pager doesn't go off often, and eh, I'm not paying enough, really, to expect that out of others.

I mean, this is what being a SysAdmin is. Something is very wrong if you get paged more than once a week, but you carry that pager all the time. It's part of why we pull down real programmer money with only a subset of real programmer knowledge.

I've got a cellphone with extra batteries and a Verizon dongle thingie that can get me online from just about anywhere, so it's really just the power I'm worried about. Sometimes I carry extra laptop batteries.

For me, the biggest problems have been when I was paged when exhausted, sleep-wise. A few times I've had to hand off because I was in that state. (I've had a problem where I handed it off because I needed to sleep, then Nick handed it back to me in the morning because he needed to sleep.)

So yeah, having someone else is pretty important, I think, and worth waiting a few more years for the 'real money' payout, but eh, if you are doing it right, you can be front line pager forever without too many issues. (that said, I'm going to a family reunion soon, in Montana. probably the farthest away I've been in a while, and certainly the longest time I've spent on a plane. Nick will be primary on pager.)