Jayne Marshall – The information desk

From when Jayne Marshall was four, she dreamed of being Dorothy, and getting lost in the land of Oz. Sitting in the information services department today, her life sounds far from that; preoccupied with computers, paperwork and phone calls. But she wouldn’t have it any other way…

Computers for me always seem to be a skill that’s easy to pick up. I think it’s because I’ve had one since I was little. I come from a computer literate family – my dad’s in computers, my uncle’s in computers, my nana’s in computers and my cousin is studying computers at the moment, so I never had to study computers at university.

I started working for the Waikato District Health Board four years ago as a temp, putting Windows XP onto all the workstations. That’s a couple of thousand of computers. We’ve got 3568 desktops. But, I mean half of them would have been done already.

As you can see, there are not many people in Information Services and so I thought I’d just help out. Then a job came up here, I applied and I got it. My dad is the service delivery manager next door but I still had to apply to the manager because I can’t have conflict of interest; there’s no special treatment here.

I used to work in retail in Paeroa, which I enjoyed, but I like this because you still get that people contact and you don’t have that whole ‘you’ve got a sale target to meet’.

My job involves giving workers at the hospital access into the system. I set them up with usernames and passwords so they can get into network and workstations. If a worker calls us up and they’re having a problem, we can have remote assistance to access their screen, which makes it so much easier to know what the problem is.

We can keep our handsfree headsets on all the time (but not in the toilet!). So if a doctor wants a USB key or a data show we can help them while we’re on the phone.

My favourite part of my job is designing request access forms. It’s fun to take something that’s been planned and make someone’s life easier. I’m a Sagittarian so we’re just creative. I definitely do a lot more creative stuff than I do the other side but when I’m here at a computer for eight hours the other side gets all the time.

The most memorable day would be when the Conficker virus hit in 2009. The virus came onto our system in December and crashed all the computers. It came in via USB stick but we don’t know how.  We all worked overtime to get things back up and running in two days. Now we know that it’s never going to happen again because we have failsafe systems in place.

After a really full-on day like that I’ll take my dog for a walk – I’ve got a little foxy called Jewel – and just clear my head a bit. But my job isn’t stressful, it’s just something you learn to deal with. You need to be able to multi-task working in IS because you have to do a hundred billion things at once.

We’re actually a pretty tight department and I think a lot of departments in the hospital are like that. It’s where you make most of your friends; at work. We have quite a lot of fun days here, we do like, loud shirt days. I like to go hard out and I always embellish a shirt with all sorts of stuff so it’s really far out and crazy. Helena is like my second Mommy, and she’s down in clinical applications out the back.

I enjoy what I do, but my ideal job would be as a writer. That would be the job I’d love to do and be able to go on book tours and meet people and read out chapters of my book. From the moment I was four I wanted to be Dorothy from the Wizard of OZ.  I wanted to be an actress and performer and get lost in the Land of Oz… until I realised it’s a big world and I like my simple life in New Zealand.

Interviewed by Libby Higson and Rachel Thomas