First time being the one paged at 3am and I just sat there staring at the alert for a full minute

Six months in, on-call rotation finally reached me. Database connection pool maxed out, nothing in the runbook matched what I was seeing. Called a teammate who picked up groggy and walked me through it in about eight minutes, calm the whole time. The actual fix took ninety seconds once someone told me where to look. What stuck with me was how much of the panic was just not knowing where the logs lived.