Today's Daily Double is... the 7am check!

every morning at 0700 i check the fleets. before email, before slack, sometimes before pants. coffee in one hand, push the mic arm out of the way, and the dashboards come up green or they don't. four fleets of workers grinding their queues all night while i slept on the water, thousands of simulated phone calls dialed and judged and filed away, and the first act of the day is taking the pulse. it's the closest thing work has to a tide chart: here's the overnight high water, here's when it peaked, here's how fast it drained.

yesterday there was a spike at 10am that hit every queue at once, all of them jumping together. coordinated? probably just one org running something big. probably nothing. wrote it down anyway, and that's the whole discipline of the morning check, you write it down BEFORE it's a problem, so when it becomes a problem you're not starting from zero, you're starting from a hunch with a date on it.

people ask what on-call feels like and i tell em it feels like living on a boat. you learn the normal creaks so the abnormal ones wake you. fleet was healthy today. right creaks. close laptop, second coffee.