Contact at the weekend

[DearGirl]

Yes this is a thread about a thread, BUT I wondered whether in the professional workplace this is acceptable/unacceptable

What is your job?
Does your boss contact you out of work hours/at the weekend?
Do you reply immediately/when you can/ignore until work hours?
Do you think you should be contactable outside of work hours?

I will reply as a boss, sometimes in an emergency it is necessary to contact my team at the weekend. For example one of the teams daughter was admitted to hospital with meningitis so we had her shifts to cover and I would rather have volunteers than tell people they need to cover.
I send a group text giving brief details of the problem and allow them to reply when it suits them. I send the text as soon as I know there is a problem giving them as much notice as possible.
If some people don't answer I don't chase them up.

I do on-call, and I get an extra payment for this. It's on a rota, so we do about one week in 7. However, if there are problems as you describe, then it's down to the on-call manager to get cover, and he can call round. It will usually mean he'll start with the person with the most experience for the particular problem, then try others if they're unavailable. This happens only rarely and for things which are major, like the outage of an entire data centre, or our most important billing system going down just as the month end run starts.

It's reasonable to me because:

• it's in our contracts;
• we get paid;
• it's not abused.

That last is the most important point, I think.