I am staying with a pediatrician over the holiday. Tonight he was on call, so he was carrying the on-call pager. He answered about 7 calls in the span of dinner---some from parents, one from the emergency room, one from the hospital nursery, and one from a consulting doctor.
It was just like tech support when he talked to the parents directly. He was very nice about it, but the questions he asked and the order he asked them reminded me of talking to Perl customers on the phone.
Very often I see computer people talk about how wierd their life is, as if the things that IT or computer people do have never been done before. The older I get the more I realize none of the things we do are new or exotic or unique to the industry.
