For the last few months at work, we've been discussing the idea of designating our course management systems as "mission-critical applications", meaning that they need to be running 24x7x365. In theory, I can't argue with that. In practice, when tonight I was awoken at midnight by a call about the server of the CMS I administer being down, my opinion changes.

Am I a server specialist? No.

Do I know much of anything about maintaining servers? No.

Was I hired with the expectation that I would acquire this skill set? No.

I'm an instructional designer with a B.A. in Elementary Education. It sure wouldn't hurt for me to know more about the server, but I don't think the server housing a mission-critical application is the place for me to be practicing. When I was called, I was in the middle of really deep sleep, so now I have a headache and can't get back to sleep. This isn't the fault of anyone, but I'm still going to be a wreck tomorrow.

I love my job-- I don't want there to be any confusion about that. The people I work with are great, the work I do can be very interesting, and surprisingly I'm even enjoying this implementation project we're working on, although it can intimidate the daylights out of me. I just think there should be some serious evaluation of this process to see if it really is effective. If so, I'll be fine with the status quo (although midnight calls still will not be cool). If not, I should be given training on server issues and/or they should change my job description to reflect this new requisite component.

*inhale*

*exhale*

Back to bed. On the plus side, I now appreciate all the beautiful shapes in the popcorn stuff on my bedroom ceiling. It's art for the common man.