How to take vacation when you’re the “on call” emergency handler

John Ahlering took a Friday off this July.

For someone running a data center requiring 24/7 uptime, that’s a big deal.

Instead of another weekday among the racks—supporting online transactions and payroll that could affect “millions of customers”—he spent most of his time at the dog park, with “no technology whatsoever.”

“I don’t have a computer. If you need me, call me. I left it at that,” Ahlering, AI engineering and team lead at data-center services provider Salute, said about how he set expectations with staff.

For people who have dedicated their lives to 24/7 support, getting even 24/1 of rest can prove a challenge, especially at smaller companies where members of the IT staff are frequently on call. We spoke with these pros about how to take time off—and mean it—when their services must constantly stay on.

Sorry to interrupt. Right after a dinner this summer, Kraig Kenney, senior engineer at managed IT services provider SundogIT, had to handle something his wife is well familiar with by now: an IT emergency.

A client had accidentally deleted a server’s file permissions, locking out users. To live up to SundogIT’s promise of 24/7 monitoring and quick response time, Kenney’s team of 10 or so engineers rotate being on call for tech problems. And for any questions they can’t answer, they might have to interrupt their boss’s dinner.

Kenney has taken a call while fishing. He’s also taken a call, mid-shingle while fixing a roof with his brother. Before SundogIT’s partnership with Courser (a company that offers additional resources for managed service providers), “it was expected that I would end up working one to two days of my vacation,” he said, adding that wasn’t the case now.

Even with extra support, however, Kenney has still been woken up for an IT request—“under 10” times this year, he said.

Everybody’s tired. Today’s providers of network, cloud, data-center, and other critical IT services usually hash out a service-level agreement with guaranteed services and uptime. Tier IV data centers, for example, must deliver 99.995% uptime, which translates into 26.3 minutes of downtime per year—which can put enormous pressure on IT teams to keep everything running.

A March 2026 survey of over 1100 IT professionals, conducted by infrastructure orchestration platform Spacelift, found that just over a third of respondents felt “constantly or frequently stressed by their work.” (A third of IT support practitioners felt this way; meanwhile, 28% of all IT pros saw “long hours” as a stressor.)

What to do. Tech career coach Kyle Elliott sees “nearly all” of his clients feeling the need to be constantly on call.

“For IT, if something goes down, they’re expected to respond right away. So it’s difficult, especially for leaders, to be able to disconnect because they feel like they’re constantly needing to check Slack, email, text message, and be available,” Elliott told us.

Elliott provided recommendations for the IT pro in need of PTO:

• Delegate decisions, not tasks. If a server goes down, for example, what actions can someone take without calling the boss on the beach?
• Define “emergency.” Document IT scenarios that can wait 8 to 12 hours until someone’s back in the office, versus the ones that require immediate response.
• Define the point person. Clarify who’s in charge in someone’s absence, what decisions they can handle, and which emergencies require a vacay interruption or a phone call to a higher-up.
• Look back! With frequent questions and calls, IT leaders must work with employees to determine which ones were truly necessary, which means asking questions like, “How can I empower you so you don’t have to call me every time?”

Some IT pros who aren’t tech leaders also might feel a corporate pressure to be available. A recent set of recommendations from the University of Phoenix suggested that IT pros facing burnout consider presenting a career-goal plan to their manager, which can help them better structure their time and mitigate at least some of their bigger stressors.

For Kenney, stress relief means not equating “on call” with “always on.” On-call employees might have to keep their phone on, for example, but they can still get dinner with their family or play with their kids. He encourages his teams to have a stress-release activity (Kenney recently started re-reading J.R.R. Tolkien again) and to prioritize recovery time after long hours. Kenney has no plans for any long summer vacation, opting instead for a lot of long weekends, he said.

When you’re the person tasked with handling an IT emergency, there’s a feeling perhaps that you’re the lone expert who can avert disaster. It’s important to make sure you’re not the only one with the expertise, Ahlering warned.

“I know a lot of us want to have that value and control,” Ahlering said, stressing the importance of knowledge transfer. “That’s an Achilles’ heel.”

“There’s more than one of me in the group,” he added.

And that’s helpful when one of you is at the dog park.