I am a railway signal maintainer, and as such, am on-call 24/7/365. No rotating on call or anything like that. If a call comes in at ANY time, I must immediately answer it and respond to the scene.

I cannot even put my phone on silent, and must even carry it into the bathroom with me.

It is quite stressful, even during periods of no calls, because its always in the back of your mind that it could ring at any moment. There is no way to decompress, and there is just this constant, low-level anxiety.

The on-call and the inability to unplug, even for a day, is the one thing I do not like about this career.

I have tried to mitigate the influence of technology in my life as much as possible, including not having ANY social media accounts (except very, very limited Reddit), not browsing the news, turning off ALL notifications/badges/banners on my iphone except for voice calls, having only the very basic apps on my phone that I use and setting it to greyscale (the phone is now a tool rather than a consumption device), and instead of chatting with people through text, I try to call them or better yet, meet them in person to talk.

I honestly wish, more than anything though, that I could simply ditch my phone altogether. I am actually thinking of looking for a new career, only because of the fact that I currently have to have my phone on me at all times. I miss the days before cell phones when we could have periods of time we were unreachable.