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When should it page someone at 3am?

When should it page someone at 3am?“If nobody acted on it last time, it's not a page.”Ruth Lindqvist, The Maintainer

💡 WHY RUTH IS RIGHT

She has carried a pager since 2003 and kept a log of every page. The pattern never changes: alerts are added after incidents and never removed, until the rotation learns to ignore all of them. Her rule is old and simple: every page must require a human action, and any alert that fired without one is demoted or deleted at the weekly review. Fatigue is not a feeling, it is a backlog.

✅ RIGHT WHEN

Alerts have accumulated for years and the on-call has started muting things.

🚩 TOO FAR WHEN

A rare but real alert gets deleted because the last time it fired was a false alarm.

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