"On call: who gets the 2 a.m. call"

On call: who gets the 2 a.m. call

Your Transfer ladder already decides *who* rings. This decides *when* each of them is reachable.

Leave it empty and nothing changes. The ladder rings in order, exactly as it does today. You do not have to set this up, and most businesses that close at six never will.

Who we ring, and who we never ring

When someone is on call, we try three phones and stop:

1. The primary — the person whose hours these are.
2. One backup — the single person you named for that slot.
3. You — always, with no time limit.

That is the whole list. We never ring everybody. If four people are on your ladder and one of them is on call tonight, the other two are not woken, not texted, and not tried — they are off, and off means off. You are the last stop, so a lead can never reach nobody.

Hours that cross midnight

An overnight slot is written the way you would say it: 18:00 → 06:00. If the end time is earlier than the start time, we understand it as running into the next morning. A Friday 18:00 → 06:00 slot covers Friday evening and the small hours of Saturday.

These are wall-clock times in your own timezone, so a 22:00 start stays 22:00 when the clocks change.

"Open 24 hours" is a different setting

There are two separate questions, and it matters that they stay separate:

- Working hours (on your Calendar page) decide when the assistant may *offer someone an appointment*. If you run 24 hours, pick the Open 24 hours, seven days schedule there. - On call (here) decides *who is reachable*. Picking a 24-hour schedule does not put anyone on call, and being on call does not let the assistant book at 3 a.m.

A 24-hour trade usually wants both: round-the-clock hours and a rotation.

On call now

The switch at the top overrides the schedule. Pick a person, pick how long, and that is who rings until it runs out or you turn it off. When it runs out, your normal schedule simply resumes — you do not have to do anything.

Anyone on your call list can also flip it from their own phone. From the number that is on your ladder, they text:

• ONCALL — put me on call now
• OFFCALL — take me off, go back to the schedule

Every flip is recorded with who did it and when. If a customer ever says nobody called them, that record is how you find out what actually happened.

The day-before text, and why we ask for an answer

The night before a shift we text whoever is on call:

> You're on call Saturday, 6:00 PM to 6:00 AM. Reply CONFIRM if that works, or DECLINE if it does not.

They reply CONFIRM or DECLINE. An hour before it starts, we send a short reminder.

This is deliberate, and it is the part most systems skip. Almost every on-call tool sends a notice and assumes it landed. *"The tech forgot he was on call"* is the single most common way a rotation fails, and a message that was delivered is not the same as a person who has seen it.

- DECLINE — we tell you straight away, by text, so you can sort it out while it is still the evening before. The backup is next in line. - Nobody answered — twelve hours before the shift starts, we tell you that too. That is the safety net for the night you meant to change the rotation and it slipped.

A decline is not the same as silence, and we keep them apart on purpose. Three declined Saturdays is a conversation about the rota. A phone nobody answers at 2 a.m. is a different problem.

Away dates

Mark someone away and they are out: they cannot be scheduled, cannot be used as a backup, and are skipped. If you try to put an away person on call anyway, we ask you to confirm first — sometimes you really do mean it, but nobody should get called on holiday by accident.

Gaps

If your schedule leaves an hour with nobody in it, we tell you when you save, naming the day and the hours. It is not an error — it still reaches you, because you are always the last stop — but it is worth seeing before a quiet Sunday morning rather than during one.

What a lead is told

Outside calling hours, our assistant normally says it will get everything ready for the morning. When somebody really is on call, it says so instead, and offers a call straight back.

It only ever says that when it is true: a rotation has to name somebody, and that person has to have a number we can dial. We will not offer a customer an immediate callback that nobody is going to make.

When may we reach a person - and why the assistant's hours are not yours to widen

After hours, a new lead's alert goes to whoever is on call. With nobody on call, When may we reach a person (on this card) sets the hours you are willing to be alerted; leave it unset and your after-hours preference decides, as it always has. Set both times the same for 24 hours.

After hours, you can always call a lead back from your own phone - they asked, and you're a person answering. Our assistant will not place a call between 9 p.m. and 8 a.m. in the lead's time zone, whatever your hours: that is what the automated-calling laws are for, and we are required to abide by them.

Two more things that now follow the on-call schedule: the lead alert text lands on the on-call person's phone (not only the owner's), and that phone can reply DONE after handling a night lead, which cancels the morning callback the assistant had scheduled.

Share new leads with your list

Turn on Share new leads with your list (on this card) and a new lead you do not take is offered to the other people on your transfer ladder before the assistant calls.

• Your claim time is shared, never added. With a 5-minute claim time and two people available, each gets about two and a half minutes, one after the other. The lead never waits longer than your claim time; after it, the assistant calls exactly as it does today.
• Only people reachable right now are offered the lead: anyone off call is skipped, and nobody is texted during the quiet hours you set above.
• Who goes first takes turns, lead by lead. A lead who called before goes first to the person who took their earlier lead.
• Each person gets a text with a link: Take this lead or Pass it on. They can also reply CALL to take it or PASS to hand it on. Passing hands the lead on at once; the last person's pass sends it to the assistant at once.
• Whoever takes a lead has 10 minutes to reach them and reply TALKED (or tap I talked with them). If we do not hear that, the assistant calls the lead, and the person who took it is told. This also applies when you take a lead yourself.
• New leads after hours are not shared this way; they follow your after-hours settings.