Cob Jockey

I'm on-call this week, and I was in the middle of a really fun and productive bareback ride on Connor after finishing chores when my paging app went off on my phone.  It was a sheriff's deputy, locked out of his account.  I could have driven over to my trainer's to get on her WiFi and done it from the laptop in my car, but instead I fired up a VPN connection over 4G from my smartphone, logged on to a generic VMware View virtual desktop, used a Remote Desktop session to access my work desktop PC 45 miles away, reset the password and notified the user...all without leaving Connor's back.

I work with it daily, and technology still amazes me.  The quality of cell signal that made it possible to do that wasn't even implemented in our area six months ago.  Without it, I would have had to cut my ride short.  With it, I got some fun and relaxed bareback canter work done.

When I was double majoring in IT and Equine Studies in college, girls would jokingly ask me if I intended to marry those two interests by riding around with a laptop suspended in front of me.  I never thought they'd eventually be right!

In my life outside of my pony, I work in Information Technology.  I love my job, really, I do.  It's me, a tiny girl, and four very tall guys supporting a network of 400 users, 500 machines and 50 servers, and there's always something fun and exciting going on, and it's rarely very stressful.  It's a good thing I like it so much, though, because starting this month they're going to ask me to jump into the weekly on-call rotation.

What I manage.  Only not this large or cool looking.

One week out of every four, I'll be asked to be on-call for nights and weekend emergencies.  These usually involve 911 or the Sheriff's Department, or the A/C unit going out in our server room, so you can understand that we have a time limit for our response time.  Thus, these are the on-call rules:

• No leaving the county
• No drinking.  Period.

Problem #1: My barn is outside of the county.
Problem #2: Red wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinnnnnnneeeeeee.

Just kidding.  I think I can live without wine pairings.  I'm not sure I can live without my weekly lesson, or seeing my pony for a week, and I'm even more uncertain about the effect this will have on our training.  When I was just taking lessons, this was a minor problem, but now that I have something to teach and condition and prep for a show season, this is a much bigger problem.

If you've followed this blog for any length of time, you know that leaving my barn is not an option.  There are no other options in this area, and there's no way I'm leaving my trainer.  I'm already planning on begging and groveling to my boss this week, which has a reasonable chance of a positive outcome, considering that this IS my hobby outside of work.  My coworkers' hobbies are PC gaming and child-rearing, so this has never been an issue for my boss before.  And the rule is that on-call time cannot unreasonably affect an employee's choices during his personal time or else he must be compensated (we are not.)

But that's obviously a long shot.

I've already posted this to the CoTH forums, but I'm interested in hearing from those of you who know me or are getting to know me.  Anyone been through anything like this before?  How did you handle it?  How did it affect you training and showing?  Obviously we're showing small potatoes this year, but I've got big dreams and I like this job enough to keep at it for the foreseeable future, so the problem is not going to go away.

Thoughts?