Believe me, when your week is spent touring the network and weekends are entirely spent washing and ironing in preparation for doing it all again the following week, it WILL bother you!
Nothing on any part of the roster at EA is protected, your 8 days off generally don't change but you will often be contacted to ask you to swap your days off. Standbys are always used. If they didn't treat their staff so badly then they'd have enough crew to service the roster but that hasn't been the case for several years; most of the time the roster is released with tens of flights not covered.