I was at the tender age of 21, and a mere contractor at my first job. I recall being paid hourly, but never filling a time card. I had just been promoted to a

I was at the tender age of 21, and a mere contractor at my first job. I recall being paid hourly, but never filling a time card. I had just been promoted to a systems admin role, after demonstrating prowess with coding and system configuration, and also the actual qualified admin had quit. One of my projects involved a rewrite of server code for efficiency as our /etc/passwd balooned to thousands of users, and too many logging in simultaneously. So on Thanksgiving Day, we just got in the door with Mom after shopping, and my supervisor rings the home phone; his first words are "There's a hacker on [production shell server]". And I told him a few commands to try, and we did not seem to suffer downtime or need our backups. That may have been the most consequential job I had for a decade. There were thousands of customers depending on us giving "four nines" of available service, including the corporate customers, but we had no formal on-call agreement, not even a way for me to access systems from outside the office, and I was still a novice after a few college courses and a lot of unstructured hacking. My [salaried] father, on the other hand, often brought a pager [which never seemed to beep] home, and one day we were all sitting around the living room when an explosion rattled our windows. We were still a bit rattled ourselves when the phone rang, and it was his cue to go down to the site and respond as a health & safety officer. So my mother said that our household policy would henceforth be: "if something explodes out there, nobody answers the phone!"