CountDC said:
soooo - who is Siri?? :rofl:
Call me on my personal cell phone and you will not get an answer. Have answering service for a reason. My phone number was once posted on a board outside the OR and I started to get phone calls at all hours from Ptes about everything under the sun. When I realized how they got my number I changed it and didn't give it to anyone. The unit had my DND cell number to call me on and leave a message (no, I didn't answer it outside work hours).
At one time we even had people that didn't have any phone. if the unit was put on a possible recall status it was passed on prior to dismissal and then it was the members responsibility to contact the duty staff every X hours to find out if recalled. Mbrs that had phones understood that they had to stay near them when warned of a possible recall.
As for needing the cell phone number because sometimes in a disaster landlines go down. Well sometimes in disasters cell towers go down and power lines go down so the cell phone battery dies. Radio and TV broadcasts don't always reach people for the same reasons. Guess that is why we used to have a "in case of disaster either contact unit or report in policy". Amazing how we functioned before computers and cell phones.
There's a big difference between the chain of command posting personal contact info as a "de facto" duty line, and members providing the CoC with reasonably efficient methods of contacting them in an emergency.
There are times when any CAF member might be needed on short notice, and that requirement is built into the compensation structure. It might be a whole unit activated in response to a DOMOP, or perhaps an individual is required to issue out an essential piece of kit to get a soldier out the door on an important last minute task or course. Maybe a unit appears on your base unexpectedly (due to some admin SNAFU) expecting to draw ammunition and rations and special arrangements need to be made. Maybe the MSE Op scheduled for that 7pm pickup gets food poisoning, and a replacement needs to be found. The possibilities are endless.
When we activated the our Territorial Defense Battalion for the 2013 Alberta floods, telephone service was down in my neighborhood, but internet was working. So, I was able to get the word out via e-mail and Facebook instant messages. Additionally, our RV was not our normal place of duty (the Armory) as access to the downtown core was restricted at that point, so there was a requirement to communicate the new location. The primary reason this all worked was because most members made reasonable efforts to make themselves "reachable" to their CoC using a variety of channels. If all comms methods had been down, we might have reverted to visiting each member's house, but why would we when there was a viable alternative?
I am not sure how this works in the other services, but in the Army virtually every unit is implicated in the DOMOPS framework at some level, which means that there is a requirement for units to conduct several fanouts per year. Why would you force your supervisor to make special arrangements to reach you (ie visiting your house) when a short telephone call, e-mail, or text message would have sufficed? Theoretically, we are required to achieve 100% accountability on these fanouts. However, in the reserve world we tend to cut them off around the 90-95% mark because we recognize that a portion of our soldiers will be truly unreachable, and I consider that perfectly acceptable for part-timers who for the most part, aren't actually on duty at the time of the fanout. I fully acknowledge that there will be circumstances when RegF members will be unreachable as well, such as leave in a remote location. Even in that circumstance however, members are required to provide some form of contact information on their leave pass in the event their leave is cancelled.
The idea of whether the CoC
should contact you outside of working hours is a totally different question, but ultimately that is up to the CoC, not the individual. There are lots of strategies to reduce the requirement to bother members outside of regular duty hours such as sound forward planning by unit leadership, and the establishment of rotating duty structures (duty officer, duty NCO, duty clerk, duty tech, etc.) with DND mobile phones to support the most common off-hours requirements, and a well-led unit will take full advantage of these. However, at the end of the day, any CAF member could be called to duty at any time.