Anyone who has carried a pager long enough develops a professional numbness. A queue backs up, a p99 drifts past budget, a deploy does something stupid at 40% rollout. You fix it, you write it up, you go back to sleep. The stakes are real but abstract: revenue per minute, an SLA credit, a churn number on somebody's spreadsheet.That numbness doesn't survive contact with a product people rely on for safety.