'Nobody panics when things go "according to plan."' -- as a software engineer, I assure you this isn't completely true. If things are too smooth, something is definitely, probably horribly and sneakily, wrong.
(When I carried a pager) I'd rather occasionally get paged at 3AM for nothing than not get a page when it actually was Something. But those were production systems for things that would make the news if they went down.