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Have you ever worked for a company there you’re so essential that the boss asks you to be on call while you’re on vacation? Would you be okay with that, or would you want to enjoy your vacation without interruption?

In this story, one tech support worker is in this situation, and he’s okay with being on call. In fact, he wants to bring the work phone with him so he can help out in case of emergency.

The boss is not okay with that. He insists that the work phone needs to stay home, but he wants the employee to answer his personal phone in case of emergency.

When an emergency situation actually arises, the boss is forced to realize he has nobody to blame but himself!

Keep reading for the whole fiasco.

Bossman knows better? OK!

So i have been working here for a couple of years, worked my way up from Junior support agent to supporting engineer (experienced but not yet senior lvl).

One of the things that started popping up in the IT landscape is the now M365 MFA we’re all so fond of having to use.

The challenge was that we had no centralized phone that held these records or MFA keys for our smaller clients, say the one or two people customers with M365 tenants not the bigger 50+ clients we had under our wings.

So more then two dozen of said keys were on my work provided phone.

It’s awful to be asked to be on call on vacation.

I went on vacation for 3 weeks, boss man was OK but said, and i quote, ” you’re our most experienced member when it comes this and that as the other one left last week, can you make sure we can call you if all hell breaks lose?”

I said sure I’ll bring the work mobile with me, any time spend on work I’ll put at the end of the vacation as compensation.

Bossman was ok BUT…. Can’t bring the work phone due to insurance or some BS I don’t remember exactly.

I argued that, while i can have 2 SIM cards in my private I wouldn’t be able to help login or anything or setup a VPN without my work phone and wouldn’t have any access to the MFA keys or prompts…

The boss thought he got his way.

He demanded the phone stayed at my home address and i take the sim card only…

Okay boss man, you said so…

So i did what he wanted, last day before leaving i showed him pulling out the SIM from one and putting it into my private phone and i put my work phone inside my bag with my laptop.

He was smiling and nodding happy as a kid that he got what he wanted………

A coworker really messed up!

Week one was splendid not a single call to my surprise.

Week 2… Absolute hell but not for me 🙂 a coworker thought he could fix whatever was called in and didn’t consult me so you know what hit the fan alright… And not for one client… no sir it hit over 50% of our small customer locations.

To be able to fix it directly they needed a global admin to undo what he messed up, problem was though that whatever he did messed with the partner portal settings thus losing global admin rights through there.

The only way to fix that is to login directly on the affected tentant with a global admin account…. That was setup with MFA on a mobile phone, in a bag, 500km away from me.

Another coworker was smart.

Thankfully a different colleague had installed break glass accounts, but he never told anyone for fear of abuse of emergency accounts, aka using them in a nonemergency situation which happened before, and wasn’t in the office that day and returned the next day fixing everything.

The clients didn’t notice anything major was wrong, thank god for that, but the onset panic was real.

The angry boss call lasted about 30 minutes, 20 minutes of him yelling and being in a panic.. 10 of me explaining why i couldn’t do anything, because i followed his words to the letter and him just making angry bubbling noise knowing i was right.

Things changed.

Upon returning we finally had a centralized password fault i had been complaining about not having, with MFA possibilities as well, and we’re allowed to bring the work phone with us as well.

Guess he did learn something after all.

Wow. Hopefully this whole situation made the boss realize how important OP is to the company. It’s still too bad to be asked to work on vacation. There needs to be someone else capable of handling emergencies.

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this situation.

Here’s some advice.

Exactly!

Another person shared their thoughts.

I guess it’s a good thing that the rules changed and the employees can now bring the work phone with them on vacation, but it would be better if they weren’t on call at all.

I hope he got paid for that half hour phone call. I’d hate to have my vacation interrupted with an angry boss yelling and panicking about a work emergency I wasn’t even able to help resolve. That’s the opposite of relaxing.