SysAdmin ESP
We were talking about on-call at lunch today, and many of us recounted that on more than one occasion we had woken up immediately prior to receiving a page that would have woken us up. I recounted an experience where I dreamed that a server was crashing right before I received a page about a server crashing. These could be random anecdotes, or perhaps premonitions. Maybe we understand the patterns of outages on some really deep inarticulate level, or maybe we just wake up a lot or dream of computers crashing but we are only apt to remember these incidences if the pager brings us to full consciousness. Who knows?
As I was sitting here with my headphones on just now not listening to anything I heard the blit blit blit blit blit of radio interference, probably my mobile device exchanging data. I had a fanciful idea that maybe, just maybe, people can actually sense radio waves in some manner and that those of us who have developed a strong Pavlovian response to a paging device might be able to connect a particular pattern with a particular outcome. When the pager near the bed starts to chatter at 2AM maybe there is some part of the human being that can see that pattern.
Probably not.
