The five stages of incident response

The scene: you're on call for a web app, and your pager goes off.

1. Denial. No no no, the app can't be down. There's no way it's down. Why would it be down? It isn't down. Sure, my pager went off. And sure, the metrics all say it's down and the customer is complaining that it's down. But it isn't, I'm sure this is all a misunderstanding.

2. Anger. Okay so it's fucking down. Why did this have to happen on my on-call shift? This is so unfair. I had my dinner ready to eat, and *boom* I'm paged. It's the PM's fault for not prioritizing my tech debt, ugh.

3. Bargaining. Okay okay okay. Maybe... I can trade my on-call shift with Sam. They really know this service, so they could take it on. Or maybe I can eat my dinner while we respond to this...

4. Depression. This is bad, this is so bad. Our app is down, and the customer knows. We're totally screwed here, why even bother putting it back up? They're all going to be mad, leave, the company is dead... There's not even any point.

5. Acceptance. You know, it's going to be okay. This happens to everyone, apps go down. We'll get it back up, and everything will be fine.