“Weekend? What’s a weekend?” While the rest of the country is escaping their

 offices for a leisurely weekend, many in IT could end up back at theirs at

the beep of a Blackberry.

For all of the talk these days about this about the pie-in-the-sky hope that

all of the wage-earners in this land can achieve some semblance of work-life

 balance, you hear a lot less about those jobs for which the notion of

guaranteed days, evenings or holiday weekends off are, quite honestly, a

joke.

“Umm… weekend? What’s a weekend?” a New York IT and services consultant

told me today.

He wasn’t alone in admitting that as the rest of the country are escaping

their offices for a leisurely weekend, he could end up back there at the

beep of a Blackberry.

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“I won’t be ‘on-the-clock’ but who knows what’ll happen this weekend since

I’m on call. I’ve got a history of jinxed on-call weekends, so my hopes

are not high,” said a Houston-based systems analyst.

Though most IT professionals understand that it is the nature of the

enterprise technology beast that they are present to toil over switchboards

 and software upgrades when the rest of an organization’s employees are

absent, their work undisrupted, it doesn’t make them any less likely to

cross their fingers and hope their number doesn’t come up in the queue.

“I myself will be on call, but I am third in the list so hopefully–knock

 on wood–nothing goes wrong,” a Microsoft engineer in Tampa told me.

In fact, the difference between manning the grill between rounds of

Marco-Polo in the pool with the kids can come down to something as little

 as what system takes a nosedive.

“… Of course, if it is an Exchange problem, I get bumped right to the top

 of the list,” the Tampa engineer explained.

Self-employed consultants often say that there is no such thing as a day

off when you’re a one man show.

“I am not only a tech, but a business owners, and in some ways this means

that no, the ’shop’ per se is never actually fully closed,” said the

New York IT and services consultant.

Furthermore, if managing project teams overseas where July 4th is most

certainly not a holiday, it’s unlikely to be a quiet day off.

This is not to say that all holiday weekends are filled with dread if you

work in IT.

“If you like computers, it doesn’t matter much if you’re stuck working on

hem over the weekend,” a Sacramento-based software CEO weighed in.

In fact, many even choose to work on personal or business technology

projects on the weekend, in part to stay ahead of the game but also

because they’re so passionate about it.

“It’s not required for my job, but I’ll be prepping over the weekend for

the MCTS: SQL Server 2005 exam,” Jerry Hammond, an operations manager at

a computer learning center in Las Vegas told me. “I have some time to do

this during my regular work week, but this is once again quickly becoming

a competitive market.”