$ pagerduty ack
Funny SRE and on-call shirts and gifts
For whoever holds the pager this week. The lines they say at 3 a.m., worn at a reasonable hour.
01 The lines
What they say at work.
Every piece is made to order. The images are mockups, and each one is labeled.
- KNOWN ISSUE. crewneck, $68
- Documented, tracked, and not getting fixed this quarter. A sweatshirt for the long tail.
- CAN'T REPRODUCE. tee, $44
- Closed as cannot reproduce. Reopened eleven minutes later.
- DO NOT MERGE. tee, $44
- Printed on the back, for the change freeze nobody read about.
- IT WORKS ON MY MACHINE. mug, $30
- True for one machine. The pager disagrees.
02 The job
Why these lines.
Site reliability and on-call work runs on a short vocabulary. Known issue. Can't reproduce. Do not merge. Each one is a small piece of incident history: the bug that has a ticket and a workaround but no fix, the report that only happens in production, the deploy freeze someone forgot to announce.
The humor of the job lives in that gap between what the dashboard says and what the customer says. Everything is green, and the site is down. The bug went away on its own, which is worse than if it hadn't. The fix worked on staging, and staging is not where the customers are.
These pieces carry the lines an on-call engineer has typed into an incident channel. They're quiet enough to wear to the postmortem.
The words, in plain English: Known issue, Cannot reproduce, Do not merge, It works on my machine.
03 As a gift
Buying one for them.
Buying for someone on call? The mug is the size-free pick, and it will be used at hours you'd rather not think about. The crew is the warm one, for cold server rooms and long incident calls with the camera off. If you know their team well, the emoji pack adds known issue and can't reproduce to the incident channel, which is where they'll get the most use. Every piece is printed to order, so give it a week or two before a deadline.
More by budget in the gift guide for programmers, and sizes, shipping and returns on the help page.
04 Someone else
Other jobs, other lines.
Buying for a whole team? Pick one line, any mix of sizes, no minimum. Team shirts.