My after-work peace is ruined by urgent support tickets

Honestly, I've been working as a remote tech support for a year now, and it's wearing me down. Tbh, my phone never stops buzzing with messages from clients, even after my shift ends. Ngl, I feel like I can't ever fully clock out because someone might have an urgent problem. Last week, I was having dinner with my family and got three pings about a server issue. I had to step away to handle it, and it ruined the evening. How do you all set limits with clients or your boss about after-hours contact? I'm worried if I say something, they'll think I don't care about my job. Any tips on managing this would be really helpful.

3 comments

3 Comments

mitchell.christopher1mo ago

But what does your actual on-call schedule look like? In my last job, we had to formally rotate who was on call for real fires, and everything else just waited. The hard part is getting your boss to agree on what a real emergency is, because most of those server pings probably aren't one.

cole821mo ago

Server issues sound bad, but how many times is it a real fire? From what I've seen, most after-hours pings are for problems that don't really break anything. Clients just panic and call everything urgent. You might need to push back and ask if it can wait until your next shift.

palmer.christopher26d ago

Can we just agree that "urgent" usually means "I don't want to wait until tomorrow"? Most of those fires could probably wait until business hours, but they know you'll answer. You gotta stop picking up the phone.