I worked a job where I was on call 24/7. The way it worked is that I would be paid $1 a minute and there was a minimum guarantee of 10 minutes. The client was billed out at $2 a minute with a minimum of 10 minutes. Essentially $60 an hour (taxed of course) went to my pocket. The issue was that it would be Sunday, 7am, and I'd get a call that would take 2 minutes. When I handed the slip to my boss he's like "at least you made a few dollars." My response was "I don't give a shit about $10."

After a point you get tired of it and since there was nobody around to relieve me of on-call duty, I was stuck. I remember one time when we had one other "tech" and I was on-call that week. I had a funeral to attend that weekend and I told the guy that I would be unable to be on the phone for a few hours that day, would he mind taking the phone and when I'm done, I'd take it back. He said "I'm going to a concert" and that was it. No backup from the bosses or anything. I was stuck. So my solution? Leave the phone off. Pretty much that's what I ended up doing a lot of the time when I was fed-up with my job and couldn't get relief.

Also, nobody required any of our clients to have high-speed access so we had to do a lot of remote work via dial-up using VNC or some other solution. Painful doesn't even begin to describe it.

My job now I have a blackberry and we rotate who's on-call between 5 of us. It's not usually bad at all and we all help each other out.

the battery life on my blackberry has gone to complete shit. If I exit Google Maps but leave Latitude enabled, my battery barely lasts a day. Understood it's constantly using the GPS to update, but maybe they need to change the frequency of the polling.