Alerting an on-call technician with repeated attempts until a real human acknowledges the alert.
Persistent paging is the broader category that Bulldog dispatch belongs to. It is any alerting pattern that retries until acknowledged, rather than firing once and trusting the recipient noticed.
A persistent pager has three knobs: the channel mix (phone calls, SMS, push notifications, or some combination), the retry interval (how long to wait between attempts), and the maximum duration (how long to keep trying before falling back). On each attempt, the system sends a structured alert with enough context for the recipient to make an accept/decline decision in seconds.
Acknowledgement is explicit: a button press, a reply keyword, or a tap on a push. Implicit signals like “the phone rang and was not declined” do not count, because the most common failure is the phone being on silent or out of reach.
Single-shot alerts have a well-known failure mode: the recipient never sees them. Phones go to silent, batteries die, notifications get buried, and a single missed page can cost a real emergency. Persistent paging trades a small amount of alert noise (a recipient might get two or three retries before they pick up) for a large reduction in lost alerts.
In the broader software industry this pattern is standard in incident response: PagerDuty, Opsgenie, and similar tools have been built around persistent paging for fifteen years. The trade dispatch world has been slower to adopt it, which is part of why so many contractors lose after-hours calls to missed pages.
Night Watch’s persistent paging implementation is the 3x3 dispatch loop: three techs in rotation, three retries per cycle, with phone calls as the primary channel and SMS as a parallel fallback. Acknowledgement is a single button press to accept. Acceptance immediately stops the loop and starts the dispatch record.