This subject is very important to know. People making transitions into the water industry may not understand what this entails. On-call duties are something that will be common in all water agencies. This means that once the regular work schedule ends, there will be people left to be Shift Operators, and they will oversee the system for a specific time.
To be clear and ensure people understand the drawback. Shift Operators will respond to calls and possibly show up to worksites at midnight, on weekends, and on holidays. This is the unfortunate truth of working for a water agency. On-call duties are a requirement of a lot of jobs since the importance of delivering water is there.
I don’t want to scare people away from this industry, but I will go into some examples that have come up. There have been staff that finished their regular shift at 4pm and were called back at 6pm. They show up at 6pm and don’t finish the work until 2am the next day. They then go home and show up back to work at 6am. This is very tough on the body and on people.
Another example, a crew was getting ready to go home when an emergency break happens, and they need to respond. The crew ends up working a total of 16 hours straight working on getting everything back in service. These are true stories. This may not always happen. There are times when it is a small leak, and the Shift Operator schedules the repair for the next day. Other times the Shift Operator lets the customer know that based on the GIS the water line does not belong to them.
We talked about the negatives. I will now leave you with one positive. The team members that are out during these calls make a lot of money. Most of this time is overtime. I know people that take advantage of this time because they know what a difference it could make on a check. Think about it if your regular rate of pay is $30. That means overtime would be $45. That is a pretty good amount of money for the 10 to 12 hours of overtime you are going to get.