If your boss is asking for on-call availability, they need to pay you for it. 

This is a pretty simple idea, but it doesn’t always have simple consequences. The employee in this story, shared on the antiwork subreddit, found out. Some jobs have unpredictable hours, and that’s just the nature of it. You can’t totally control when you’re going to work, and you have to live with that. But those kinds of jobs come with different expectations, and you’re still allowed to set boundaries. If you’re on call, then you better be paid for being on call. But most jobs just try to get away with taking advantage of their employees and getting them to come in whenever they want. It’s important that you live a life outside of work. It’s your life, after all, and you only get one shot at it. So if you’re constantly compromising yourself to do a job that doesn’t respect you, then that’s a huge issue. The person in this story was experiencing that in a huge way. She just wanted a part-time job to help with living expenses. What she got was an unworkable situation where her boss expected way too much of her without giving much in return. In these kinds of jobs, things come up.