I have ALWAYS kept my personal phone number secret from employers, colleagues (except very trusted ones), and all other sorts of insensitive twats.

End of workday, the company SIM gets switched off. Same procedure when on holidays.

As for Teams, disabling the "update in the background" and/or turning off notifications works wonderfully.

I prefer an entirely separate work phone, but that's a matter of taste.

BTW, Teams (on mobile) has a "quiet hours" function (Settings>General>Notifications) that lets you block all notifications from it whenever you set, ie evenings and weekends. That way I don't have to remember to turn it back on on Monday morning.

Exactly this. Back when I was a techie, the listed mobile number for me was my work phone. I did not have Outlook or Teams on my personal phone, and when it came to home-time, my work phone was turned off. Once or twice I did get a query on a Monday morning "I was trying to reach you over the weekend", my response was simply "I'm not paid to be on-call and was out enjoying the weekend with my family".

We did used to have an on-call rota for a while - I was part of it. But then they ditched it after deciding it wasn't cost effective to pay people to be on-call over the weekend - and I was buggered if I was going to sacrifice my weekend without any pay for my trouble.

This. I've worked on big projects and even when given a work phone, it would get locked up in my desk Aug my laptop at 5pm when I left the office. If you're not going to pay me a double hourly rate for 5pm to 9am, then I don't care of the building is on fire..it's a not me problem. If you're not willing to pay your staff double time for every hour they're on call then it can't be THAT important to have staff on call.

Anyone who takes that £100 extra for a week on call is a mug.

I worked a contract for a public sector outsourcer who'd put contractors on furlough 4 times a year just before the financial results came out. A week at a time with usually a couple of days notice. Laptop & phone locked away and emails for that entire period bulk deleted on my return. The customer was never happy but again they engaged the outsourcer & regardless of the "risk to life" databases we looked after, there a YOU problem not a ME problem.

Same when they fucked up renewals & their time sheet systems didn't work for weeks..laptop & phone locked away, go home relax. Come back and bulk delete all the emails from the time away. Then explain to the customer why.

Stand up for yourselves, no last minute "oh can you work this weekend? We made deadline promises to the customer." Or"this project that you're hearing about today for the first time is really important & you need to work late /stay "

Look at how IT positions have been offshored, outsourced, rates have been decimated for "shareholder value"....never feel guilty at not being in the office...the answer to ANY user bitching...."Go complain to the finance department or the board of directors "

Same here, albeit not a dual-SIM phone. I've kept my mobile number private from colleagues for yonks, and my current manglement and direct colleague know not to bother me unless the world (for us) is literally ending. So far it's worked; except last year where I made the mistake of looking in my email and seeing a clusterfuck of epic proportions forming whilst I was seeing the sites in a European capital. My colleagues didn't say anything to me, which is much appreciated, but the fact something impacted my area of responsibility with me unable to do anything but watch ruined the rest of my holiday.

If our organisation were to insist on on-call, my reaction would be identical to others in this comment section: a) you pay for a work phone issued to me, and b) you pay me double overtime for any periods on call or appropriate time off in lieu. You do *not* mess with my private life... my job is stressful as it is, I don't need more stress when I'm away on holiday.

Time off in Lieu...

Yes, if I work six hours at time and a half and you decide you wont pay me for it, I will be taking nine hours of time off to cover those nine hours of pay you don't think I'm worth.

"Dual SIM phone

I have ALWAYS kept my personal phone number secret from employers, colleagues (except very trusted ones), and all other sorts of insensitive twats.

End of workday, the company SIM gets switched off. Same procedure when on holidays.

As for Teams, disabling the "update in the background" and/or turning off notifications works wonderfully."

Dual SIM phone all the way, indeed.

You even have dual work/personnel profiles if your phone if enrolled to a company (Android 14 & 15 tested, same I think for IOS) and you can schedule activation/deactivation of work profiles depending on time/date, so team will stay quiet always after work schedules, no more teams calls ...

I also think you can do the same with the SIM, but not tested.

It's not just IT Support people who get this.

I'm a HR manager at a University. One of my team members got a call on a weekend evening at 11:30PM, demanding an employment letter so she could complete her mortgage application before the cut-off time of midnight (in her home country).

I told the employee (a department director) that if she ever did that again, I would report her for gross misconduct. I also gave my team member a bunch of flowers and a (paid) day off.

>>I'm a HR manager at a University.

>>...I would report her for gross misconduct. I also gave my team member a bunch of flowers and a (paid) day off.

Hmm shurely shome mishtake? The guild of HR managers may want a word - displaying feelings, feelings of an almost human nature? That will not do!

Seriously - well done. The sooner people, at all levels, realise that work != life the better.

I have seldom been called on work matters out of normal hours.

But a few memorable incidents have made me prefer vacations east of the office rather than west, though. The crisis discovered when the office opens on the East Coast can lead to a call that awakens the techie on vacation in California at 0600; if the techie is vacationing in Europe, it will be early or-mid afternoon, the techie will be awake and alert, and the techie will have readily understood reasons for not having a computer to hand. (Gee, Mike, I'd like to help you, but I'm at the British Museum right now.)

"reasons for not having a computer to hand. (Gee, Mike, I'd like to help you, but I'm at the British Museum right now.)"

Surely you'll have everyone's computers then?

> techie will have readily understood reasons for not having a computer to hand. (Gee, Mike, I'd like to help you, but I'm at the British Museum right now.)

So that explains the sign in front of the abacus displays: "in emergency, break glass".

We used to be Barclays customers, but not for many years now. I was surprised, therefore, to get an email from them apologising for the weekend's outages.

Do they not know who their customers are? Did they restore their customer table from a ten-year-old backup?

Sheesh. I fired off an email asking their Data Protection Officer to delete us from their mailing list.

Having had dealings with them in relation to a non-profit organisation, they really are a shambles. No concept of procedures; paperwork that literally needs to be completed in triplicate and then lost multiple times. Closing accounts for no reason. Unable to change signatories.

Frankly, I'm amazed they're still trading.

"...paperwork that literally needs to be completed in triplicate and then lost multiple times."

Did it also need to be buried in soft peat and recycled as firelighters?

Beer before hitchhiking with Vogons, Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster after -->

And yet... I've had four Barclays accounts for nearly fifty years (and had a business account for a number of years, though no longer) and I have _never_ had an issue with them (except when things stopped working this weekend; they've got better now).

My biggest annoyance with them is the 2.75% they take off the international exchange rate.

Barclays > Wise > other currency > Wise > Barclays

Other cost effective international payment providers available, but Wise has worked well for me so far..

Shutting down accounts!

Yes been there with a rural youth charity that had circa $45K in the various accounts at the time. When it was raised at the charity board meeting, almost everyone who was connected with another countryside based charity, (5 charities in all) reported that their accounts had been shut down in the same with no reason given. We had to pay our single, part time, staff member out of our own pockets for a couple of months (discussed with the Charity Commission first!) before we could get the money out of the closed account and into somewhere else we could pay the salary from. It didn't help that they wanted all the signatories to sign the paperwork and one of them was backpacking around SE Asia.

After at least 60 years, they just shut down our account without notice - disgusting!

I haven't dealt with them for my own accounts since 1993 as they were abysmal then and all the subsequent evidence suggests they haven't got any better. Their recent treatment of charity accounts has been somewhere between shambolic and appalling, and when I did have to deal with them, only yesterday (trying to take my recently deceased mother off a charity account), I came to the conclusion that they just don't want any customers, at least in this town - the "Barclays Local" turns out to be a single desk in a small serviced office in a trading estate on the edge of town, over half a mile from the nearest bus stop.

25 years ago, I attended an AIX (IBM Unix) conference for large UK users. There were about 30 organisations represented, and 10 of them were from different teams at Barclays, half of whom weren't aware of the other Barclays installations' existence.

And this is the reason that shortly after that, Barclays started consolidating their AIX infrastructure under a single banner called Midrange Systems, and centralised all of the support and deployments onto managed server farms of known configuration and with a model AIX implementation that applications had to be written for, part of a project called Stretch that I was involved in when contracting at Barclays.

As a team, we ended up producing mobile application workloads that had encapsulated import and export methods, network addresses and specific requirements all stored on the SAN disk containing the application and data, that allowed the workload to be moved between different systems in the server farm by re-presenting the disks, years before Cloud was even a thing.

It worked really well, and I later went back when they updated the model implementation for Power5 systems with jumps in AIX and various other infrastructure components, and added additional rapid deployment tools to stand up systems and workloads very quickly.

They tried to do something similar for their other UNIX platforms, but they never quite managed the flexibility or control that we achieved with AIX.

Unfortunately, I contracted back with them again a few years later, just before they outsourced a significant part of their UK support to India as part of a 'Follow the Sun' support model, only to find that the momentum had not been maintained, and everything was falling apart. The automatic deployment systems that had been created were being 'augmented' with manual hacks, because all of the people who understood the automation had left or been let go, and nobody remaining knew how to (or attempted to read the instructions for) modifying the deployment code. I was brought back to do something very specific, so I was not able to fix anything to make it work properly again.

Because they moved support to a cheaper country, I never did work for them again, so I don't know what happened next.

" Do they not know who their customers are? Did they restore their customer table from a ten-year-old backup? "

I'm a Barclays customer and I didn't get an email.

Yet some bloke at work told me he got an email from them, but he's never been a customer with them.

I'm really not surprised. I once missed a payment on my Barclaycard (my fault), and when double-checking the interest fee, discovered it didn't seem to match their explanation of how it was calculated. I calculated it every way I could think of, but could never match their number. Their "support" simply read me what was printed on my statement, and despite me pointing out that the interest fee they quoted didn't seem to agree with a "daily compounding" system like the statement said, they had nothing else to add. Never could get someone to actually look at the account and calculation and tell me how they got it.

Switched to Citi, where I get 2% cash back instead of Barclaycard's 1.5%.

If you gave your personal phone number to your colleagues, more fool you.

If you keep your company phone turned on after working hours, more fool you.

If you check Teams or work e-mail after working hours, more fool you.

If you regularly agree to do work outside working hours for no payment, more fool you.

All these events where people are forced to do work outside working hours can easily be avoided by clearly separating your working hours from your own hours. Anyone who lets themselves get abused by colleagues or management like this are failing to assert themselves. If you don't get paid to be on call, there is nothing which requires you be on call. If your employer tries to make it any other way, start looking for a new job. Talk to your union. Report your employer to the authorities.

Being employed does not give the employer any rights to your time outside your contractually agreed working hours. Any attempts by manglement or colleagues to ignore that should result in a firm refusal. If you don't do that, they will take advantage of your lack of backbone again and again and again. More fool you.

Exactly this!! No-one is obliged to do ANYTHING outside of their contract of employment, so if you don't wanna do it, don't do it. Even if your work phone is turned on, and Teams is bonging away on your personal (why would you install works stuff to your own equipment!?!?), you can simply ignore it. The only person to blame is you if you are answering outside of work hours.

"why would you install works stuff to your own equipment!?!?"

Regardless of the current discussion about out of hours calls, you should always keep clear water between your work equipment and accounts, and your personal stuff. If you don't, you open yourself up to accusations of unauthorised access and other naughty things.

So, no dual SIM phones; always two separate devices. Ensure everything is air-gapped.

Me, paranoid? You should see my collection of T-shirts.

I do have work email on my personal phone, but the notifications are set to silent.

I do it like this so that I have a bit of an idea of what to expect when I'm next working - what might need prioritising etc. Yes, I could do that at the start of the day but I prefer to be forewarned.

Occasionally I'll see a request that I'll deal with right away, but none of my colleagues or clients expect that (and I account for that time in the next shift)

In a big project I may even spend a week working beyond end-of-shift, but only because it's convenient for me - and 1.5 hours/day for a week grants me a day off later.

Basically, make sure your work allows you the flexibility that you want (which may be none, that's fine) and realise that it works both ways.

I keep work stuff on the phone because I'm remote, I homeschool, and sometimes we leave the house (where the company laptop stays). It also helps when travelling, especially when the company travel app wants to verify something using email when I'm away from the laptop or Wi-Fi.

But outside of working hours, I set an alert profile called "Personal" that, like the above post, mutes the email + Teams (including the work softphone) entirely. You'd have to text/call me directly, which I only allow some to do, and if so I know I better answer.

>>I keep work stuff on the phone because I'm remote, I homeschool, and sometimes we leave the house (where the company laptop stays). It also helps when travelling, especially when the company travel app wants to verify something using email when I'm away from the laptop or Wi-Fi.

Horses for courses but definitely see what you can do to sort something out regarding a work phone. The cost isn't great, in the grand scheme of things, and there are options besides them paying for everything.... e.g. you could buy a suitable (cheap disposable)smartphone and they could buy the SIM....

What I ask people here is "If somene sent you a compromising/contractural email to your personal phone, which then got involved in something legal, your personal phone could become evidence. Do you want to take that risk?"

I don't understand this. If you don't want to see things out of hours, shut down teams and work email, turn off the work phone. (And never give a personal number except to people who can be trusted to know what an emergency is - I made that mistake once, never again!) Like many of my colleagues, both academic and administrative, I do work out of hours whenever I feel like it, but I never feel obliged to *do* anything out of hours.

This 100%.

I've a work laptop and that is the only thing that I get work emails and phone calls on. When it goes in my bag at the end of the day that is where it stays until the next time I need it. Fuck this noise of having to keep your work phone on, or having work communications, on a personal device.

It's not just IT though. My wife is a lawyer and last week I needed to work in her office (as my dock wasn't working and I could not be fucked going to the office to get a new one). She had her work phone on the desk and she told me don't answer it if it rings. Fine. But the bloody thing kept going off for various things. I decided I'll put it in flight mode. And I left it. I forgot about it. She bollocked me for it on the evening saying she missed emails and a call - but it was her day off. She felt the need to return calls or look at emails on her day off .

I think really, and I mean this in the best possible way to my wife and others, just grow a pair and tell these people to fuck. off. You'll call them back during the period of time you're contracted to work, which is not 24/7 365.

"My wife is a lawyer and...."

Rules are a bit different in some lines of work. You might argue that personal time should always be personal time, but I've worked for a City law firm (not a lawyer myself) and the prevailing attitude is "we'll pay big bucks, but you play by our rules. And our rules include looonnnggg hours, and still contacting you whenever we like - if you're not happy there are other employers."

Easy for us to say on this side of the Atlantic with our worker protections, from what I hear about the US, saying 'no' to a boss can lead to you being fired with no recourse.

Most are on what is known as 'at will' which involves zero notice for them firing you or you leaving.

If there is lot of jobs all power to the employee, otherwise all power to the employer.

I was a manager in the days before mobile phones. On the whole people treated my team OK, but there were some people who wanted out of hours service - mainly because they were not organised enough.

I told my team that if there were people they didn't want to deal with (out of hours) for any reason to give me a call.

I had several responses I used.

Hello, I'm the manager... if you want this work done before next week, I'll need your manager to OK for me to charge them the overtime. Minimum charge £1000. ... Ok speak to you next week

Hello, I'm the manager, ... You say it's urgent - that's fine. I'll get my team working on it, once I've contacted the senior manager to OK the change in priorities. ... Hello.. Hello?

And once... Hello I'm the manager, hello Senior manager... Yes, I see that it is urgent. I'll see if any of my team are free.

In the days before mobile phones I worked with a team that used a pager to summon the on-call techie. There was only an informal rota, and it became standard practice for them to check coat pockets before going home on Friday in case the pager had "fallen" into the pocket.

That's my fondest memory of my current boss boss. He said that when I was asking for a bit of flexibility around start and end times; I now have a much better work/life balance.

Now they get nothing out of hours unless they pay - work phone is switched off at end of day and on again when I get in the following working day.

As a union rep I advise my members to do the same. Don't look at work email on personal devices, don't answer phones/emails after hours, set Teams to Away. If the boss complains about you not reading email out of hours, point him in my direction.

A couple of times spring to mind.

Once when we had outsourced to India and some people thought they could still contact us, the onshore team, sometimes on our private home landlines. I spent about 3 months hanging up about 5 times a week, until they had to implement an on-shore on-call on top of their off-shore on-call. This was in France where the laws obout being contacted by work out of hours are fairly strict, so even hanging up on directors was perfectly reasonable.

Another, although not technically an on-call call, when a manager insisted that something had to be completed with the utmost urgency as it was vital. Somehow, he didn't appreciate me phoning and waking him at 03h30 in the morning to let him know it was finished. My response when he asked why I was calling him ? "As it was so urgent, I assumed you would be still up waiting for my call to confirm that it was finished." Needless to say he never did anything remotely like it again.

" This was in France where the laws obout being contacted by work out of hours are fairly strict "

Yup, we have the "right to disconnect" which means that outside of my contacted hours, NMFP (unless, of course, I'm being paid for it to be MFP, but I'm not so it's not).

" waking him at 03h30 in the morning to let him know it was finished "

And for that , an upvote and a beer. Well played.

Bill the department whose member of staff raised the call. Double rate at least, minimum 4 hours. There's no point in warning that you'll do this because morons like that will ignore the warning.

I used to refuse on-call rotas on the basis that if you call I'll respond if at all possible but I won't undertake to sit by a phone all weekend or whatever - this in the days long before mobile phones. OTOH if I was called it would have been serious, usually nothing short of a murder enquiry.

There was one exception when my local police station contacted me directly. They wanted an independent witness to the behaviour of a drunk in the cells. He'd already damaged one cell door - double layer of thick wood with a steel plate between the layers - by head butting it.

C'mon El Reg - reading your linked story, that "apparently homeless" family was homeless in only the most technical way - they couldn't move into their new house because of the Barclays glitch, for which the bank should perhaps be made to pay but the family is hardly destitute and sleeping rough...

Did they have a home they could live in? No? Was it Barclays fault because of the system issues? Yes? Then they were homeless because of the Barclays glitch.

Homeless due to bank snafu ... almost been there back in late 80s due to bank not clearing funds for house purchase on the Friday evening before a holiday weekend. Sitting there with a hired removal van to be returned next day and not being allowed keys, 100 miles from our previous des res. Fortunately it all went through last minute so we got keys and moved in.

So yes it's a real thing. My sympathies to families affected by Barclays. Oh and charity accounts, both Natwest and Barclays are tortuous for changing signatories, but Barclays get extra rotten tomatoes for losing paperwork emailed to their mandate team by one of their own branches. Local county Building Society? Wha a breeze, how it should be.

Off-time phone calls? Ha, that's just the beginning.

Back around the turn of the century I worked at a company that was pushing hard into an IPO. We were shepherded through the process by a team of cutthroat investors and stand-in leadership, and everything reliably sucked. The company philosophy changed from "kind, supportive, collaborative, and communicative" to very much "move fast and break everything (people included), fire anyone involved with the broken part, and repeat until successful".

And, yeah, company or client calls flooding in 24/7, be sure to keep your cellphone on and be responsive.

We burned through people like kindling. The reduction in headcount was sold as "lean attrition", demonstrating to potential investors that we were cutting away the dead weight and doing more with less.

We pushed, god did we push. Ten hour days became fifteen became twenty became twenty-four. Dedication was measured in days without sleep or showers or change of clothes. We smelled like a frat house, we smelled like dead men.

And our exhaustion built failure, with code as a side effect

In the midst of this, and an entirely predictable divorce at home, I had a relatively minor heart attack lovingly distilled from pure stress and lack of sleep, was out of work for a couple of months, and returned not to my office but to the bullpen where new employees started and failing employees ended. I lasted maybe three weeks and hit the silk.

A few weeks or maybe a couple or three months after, I received a call from my equally-cursed successor, a good colleague - smart, capable, great with people. One of our teammates had committed suicide on the eve of their planned wedding. He was a good man. We lost him to effing software.

It is worth noting that this had no discernable effect on the great machine; it continued separating wheat from chaff and grinding each to powder. The IPO proceeded, remnant leaders succeeded. One former colleague acquired a gorgeous vineyard in Argentina, another executive bought a giant yacht and sailed around the world with his family.

The point of this recitation, dear reader, is that "we need you to take some calls after hours" is a gateway drug, just a little taste to get you hooked, a loyalty test hidden in a nod, a wink, and a secret handshake.

Don't sign up for that. Go do something sane and constructive that benefits you and the world around you as much as it does your clients or employers.

Icon for raising a glass to absent friends.

At one job, during the annual review, I was asked about my loyalty to the company. I replied that I was just as loyal to the company as the company was loyal to me. My boss really didn't like that answer, and--sure enough--during the next "reduction in force", I was one of the ones that was reduced, thus answering both questions.

I once had to explain to a manager that respect is something you have to earn and is not part of his job description - he didn't like that one bit.

I once had a customer track down me by calling my parents' home number on a Sunday morning, on the off-chance that I was there! (The customer wasn't even a friend of theirs, my mum just happened to do some part time work at the place) Luckily they told the customer that no, they wouldn't be passing on the message, and they could wait until Monday.

I've worked in, and managed, small IT departments for over 30 years and for much of that time I've effectively been providing 24/7 cover but with a caveat - I've nearly always been able to trust my colleagues to respect that and only seek help in emergencies.

The most common out--of-hours call was at one employer where the night-shift in the warehouse would have password problems every few months, but they'd just text me and I could deal with the issue remotely in a few minutes (generally when I got pack from the pub!) That one was fair enough, 5 minutes of my time against a whole shift standing largely idle and missed deliveries.

I had one manager though who tried phoning me three times successively at about 2am. I didn't answer, he should have known to leave a message after the first call but didn't. It turned out to be a problem with a spreadsheet that could easily wait until the next day. I let it be known that if he repeated that I would be raising a formal grievance.

Back in the day when the company issued pagers to those on call--and some who weren't. I was asked to keep my pager on while on vacation. I agreed to do so, but didn't mention that I'd be camping in a remote valley in the Sierra Nevada that was certain not to have pager coverage...and, sure enough, didn't. I did leave the pager on, since I was asked to.

I always made in plain that, if I were driving, I wouldn't respond to pages until I got to some convenient stopping place, such as my destination. I still hold to that principle with cell phones.

Worked for a company who were bought by IBM. They had a blanket "24/7 follow the sun" policy for support. As devs, we were in third line support. Our manager asked for volunteers to carry the Nokia featureless phone (aka 'Punishment phone') on the weekend for an extra £100. As expected there were no volunteers until we found out our customers worked a strict 9-5 week. After that, the phone was dubbed the 'Golden phone' and was shared amongst the now eager devs.