PagerDuty Broke My Sleep. My Therapist Had No Framework.

PagerDuty Broke My Sleep. My Therapist Had No Framework.

At 2am, a column name ended my night.

Not a server fire. Not a breach. Someone upstream had renamed a field from "user_id" to "userId" — snake_case to camelCase, in a PostgreSQL database, without telling a single person downstream — and my pipeline ate it. The fix took twenty minutes. The aftermath took two hours, because my brain does not distinguish between a resolved incident and an active one. It just replays the alert sound. Over and over. PagerDuty has trained me like a dog.

I fixed the column. I could not fix being awake.

Here is the thing nobody says plainly about on-call work: the damage is not the incident. The incident is almost always smaller than the dread. The damage is the cortisol spike at 2am, the forty-five minutes of lying in the dark while your nervous system argues with your prefrontal cortex, the next morning when you are half a person at standup and everyone asks if you are okay and you say "yeah, just a late night" because explaining the camelCase situation would take longer than fixing it did.

My therapist told me to set boundaries with work. I told her my work pages me while I sleep. She did not have a framework for that. This is not a criticism of her — she is good at her job. It is an observation that the vocabulary of workplace wellness was built for a world where work stops when you leave the building. That world is gone. The building is in your pocket. It has your cell number.

The camelCase thing deserves its own sentence: do not use camelCase in a relational database. This is not a style preference. It is a convention with consequences, and the consequences land on people who are asleep. Naming standards exist precisely because systems talk to each other across teams, time zones, and consciousness levels. When you break the convention without a migration plan and without telling anyone, you are not making a technical decision in isolation. You are making a decision about whose 2am belongs to whom.

The counterargument is that engineers should build more resilient pipelines. Alerting on a missing column is a known failure mode. Write better schema validation, catch it earlier, make the system fault-tolerant. This is true. It is also the kind of advice that sounds like engineering and functions like blame-shifting. Resilience is not an excuse for carelessness. Both things can be asked of people at the same time.

What I want — what I think most people in this work want — is not to never be paged. Incidents happen. Systems fail. The job is real. What I want is for the humans upstream to understand that their decisions have a blast radius that extends past their commit message. A column rename is not a neutral act. It is a small explosion with a fuse set to someone else's sleep schedule.

The alert sound still lives in my head. I hear it sometimes when my phone buzzes with something ordinary — a text, a calendar reminder, nothing. My nervous system does not wait to find out. It just fires. My therapist would call this a stress response. I call it the cost of being on-call, paid in the currency of sleep, billed without notice, at 2am, because someone liked the look of camelCase.