Cynthia Dorrington gave us a tour of her worksheet at MT&T in Halifax.  She showed us her office cubicle, the Help Desk, Desk Top Support and the Coms Room.  Unfortunately we were unable to visit the Toll Office on North Street which houses the bigger server.  The following is a slightly edited version of her talk with us.

Our Role Model:  Cynthia Dorrington

"I'm Cynthia Dorrington and I work with MT&T.  I've been working for MT&T for about 14 years.  I started off in a different area.  I actually was in the administrative support area.  Then I moved over there to become a TSR.  I actually used to take phone calls from customers and set them up with  telephones and any other service they required.  From there I did  a major change: I became a programmer.  Basically we took 25 employers and we were trained in a two year training program in just four months.  So there was a lot of work and a lot of time went into it.  You basically had to give up your life.  No social life at all, but it was worth it.  I moved into this area six years ago.  My first role in this particular area was actually maintaining some systems - stand alone systems.  Then I ended up moving from that area after I had some experience there for about three years.
 
I ended up moving over to the network side.  Very few females are in this particular area.  It's a very male dominated area.  The area I was previously in -  main frame - I would say approximately 75% of females are in that area because they sat there and they programmed and they really didn't have to leave their desks - that's where they stayed and worked.  On the network side you're on call.  You get up in the middle of the night.  If something happens and your system dies, you have to go in.  There's a lot of training involved.  A lot of the training does not exist in Nova Scotia.  You either go to Ontario or the States.  The training is under the sunsolaris and oracle programs.  Solaris is just an operating system on a unix box just like you have DOS or WINDOWS.  Okay... so I sit down and I play around with that.
 
At the present moment I am installing a brand new system and I will actually be handing it over and training new people on it.  They will actually go in and program people's telephone lines on the digital switch.  A telephone line, for example, they have to program that in order for you to get a dial tone at home.  This is the system I will be handing off and training all the service reps to do.  So they will actually be taking this system and working on it from here on in and I will actually just be a maintenance person.  If anything happened to that system while they were doing anything, then I go in and find out what the problem is and rectify the problem, fix it and make sure its all working.  So basically that's what one of my major roles and responsibilities is here.
 Do any of you guys have a voice mail at home?  I maintain that system.  Basically your voice mail box is set up... in that system if anything happens, if there are any reports... Let's say you can't get to your mail box or something like that; then they would ask me to start checking around to find out what the problem is.  It's called the octel voice messaging system and I maintain it for Nova Scotia and PEI at the present moment.  So for all the mailboxes that are sitting out there on this particular system I make sure that the system is always working and available for you guys.  If it's not, then I'm there fixing it... that's my responsibility for that particular system.
 
Overall I'm involved in a lot of different things.  My main  base is this cubicle here at the Maritime Building, but I do work out of North Street (the Toll Office) as well.  That is the main building that MT&T has because the main long distance switch is there.  If you are making a long distance phone call out of province, your call has to route through that building in order to get out of Nova Scotia.  That's a big key office for us.. I work out of there on the fourth floor.  It's a mini computer room.  It has lots of computers in it... not PCs like the one in my cubicle or desk top computers but computers that are huge, very big systems.  Personal computers are very tiny compared to a server.  In most cases a server can stand as tall as me if not taller.  It houses all kinds of different things on it.  Basically that is what this room has..all of these servers setting there.
 
Now there is a room on this floor I'm going to take you into.   It's the coms room we call it.  It's called the communication room because there are servers in there.  It's our main communication point from this floor out of this building. because other than that this floor is isolated.  I can't talk to anyone else in MT&T unless I go through this coms room.
 The com room is not only for the phone lines (on the other side of that wall is a phone box where all our phones are hooked up to) but as well all our PCs are also on a LAN aspect which is a local area network.  Now there are two types of system.  There is a LAN system which is a small little system.  It allows a lot of PCs to talk to one another.  Then you have the WAN system, the wide area network, which basically allows different communities to talk to one another.  Say, for example, Guysborough wants to talk to New Glasgow who wants to talk to  Halifax.  You have to use a WAN or wan system versus if you want to just talk within this floor only to all the PCs on this floor; if I want to communicate and I want to send a message down the hall across the tower, you have to be on a LAN system.
 
The coms room allows us to talk to the outside world.  If we didn't have that room and that system goes down we can't talk to the outside world.  We may talk to each other maybe but that's all.  So that is a very key room and all floors have them.

The Help Desk Area:
If I have a problem with my PC, I don't think about it.  I'm not going to sit down and fiddle around and try to figure out what the problem is.  I'm just going to phone and have the help desk fix my PC for me.  My job is not fixing PCs.  In our particular area we have different roles that we do.  My job is to  fix bigger servers not to try to sit here and play around with my PC and try to figure out what the problem is.  There are people there who actually take the phone calls and if they have had a problem like this before, they can tell me exactly what to do and if they haven't, they will send someone out and look at it or they will pass it on to desk top support.
 
There are two females and four males that work in that area. It's more a hands on area and I see more females moving to that area now.  Previous to about two years ago, it was all males.   Females didn't want to get involved in that aspect.  It's easy; it's relatively simple.  If you want to take a computer course, you just don't have to take it in the programming aspect of things.
 There are different avenues you can take if you're going to a computer course.  You can work on the hardware which means take computers apart, put memory in, and do all kinds of stuff on the inside portion of it.  This is versus on the outside end, which is where you would end up doing what I do - like program.  Work in the help department or work in desk top support, fixing the insides of computers is really necessary for people on my end of things.  We should have more people in those areas, especially when you have as many PCs as we have in our organization.  When you think of MT&T, we have roughly 3,000 people and I would say with over 2,000 PCs.  So when you think about that you might have 20 to 25 people having problems on the same day.  You might not have enough staff to go out there and do everything.
 
A lot of technicians now have laptops.  I have a laptop which I take home with me from time to time.  I just log in and do the work I need to do.  I can remotely log in to MT&T's LAN so I can actually work from home.  We do have people that can actually work from home.  They sort of work two or three days at home and work the rest of the time here.  It's called teleworking and there are more companies that allow that.  What companies are now doing in most areas benefits the female aspect of things.  A lot of females have families; these companies do cater to these females in regards to teleworking because it allows them to stay home to work.  It's called telework and it works for women raising families.
 
In the area I'm in you have to still work your way through the system.  You have to work yourself through the system as a female because there still aren't a lot of females in this field.  You have to do the little things like minutes for the meeting, typing, coffee etc.  Sometimes you have to put your foot down and say: "Fellows, it's not my role; it's not my responsibility".  The guys have tried it on me.  Some of them still have that attitude towards women.  This is especially among the older guys.  They are coming around a lot but you have to understand this group is either older or younger.  You don't have middle of the road types.  There are lots more people in their 20's in this department than when I first started.  It's amazing; lots of people are coming here right from school and making good money. It's a great job and its a job they are crying for everywhere across Canada as well as across the States.  In a field like this you can go far.  A couple of the people who used to work in main frames like I did have moved to the States, and they are making close to a $100,000 American.  So it's a very very growing service and industry, and they will pay for the service; they will pay for the knowledge as long as you can get it.
 
I'm talking about anything to do with computers at this level, not just working for the phone company.  In this particular job I work with the phone company but I can go anywhere as long as they need the information and the background I have.  I can go almost anywhere with my knowledge - now with  my knowledge of the oracle data base.  It's one of the number of databases out there in Canada actually.  It's probably one of the number one data bases in the world.  A lot of people are using it in conjunction with applications.  So I can go anywhere that has an oracle data base and work with it.  I don't just have to work with a phone company.  I have the telephone background because I started here years ago.  So I understand how a switch works and so I understand all that stuff.  So the telephone background is there but what I do today isn't always based on telephone knowledge.
 
There is an Information Technology Institute which actually offers a course here in Halifax.  After taking this course, you are almost guaranteed a job.  You go in with a 90%+ guarantee that you will have a job when you come out.  There are companies that are picking up students from there as soon as they graduate.  The starting salary is in the mid $30,000 to $40,000.  MT&T picked up people from there.
 
So today, it's not like when I went to university and had to go out there and find a job afterwards.  Then you actually had to go out there and beat the streets.  Nowadays in the computer field, you come out and walk right into a job.
(At this point, Cynthia sat down at the computer, opened up a menu and showed us the system that she was working on for her service reps.)
 
My service reps will be programming switches that are coming out of PEI and Nova Scotia.  I go through the longer process.  All they will see is this screen, the centrex management system.  So basically we have different devices or switches set up.  This is a gooey based system or graphically used interface.  It's all just sitting there.  You don't have to type anything in.  You just sit there and pick what you want.  You just say go to and whatever.  It's an easy system to use and to tell what you want.  It's easier than another system I could show you that is all type written.  You have to type everything in, in order to get anything - any information.
 
These are the different switches across Nova Scotia and PEI that we have connections to.  So I can go into any of these switches and connect to the telephone switch basically.  If we have any problems I have to make sure that we can connect to these switches, that the system can talk to all these switches at any time.   Because you (pointing to Tera) might be downstairs working on an order that might be going into my Bedford switch but you (points to Jennifer) might be working on an order going to Charlottetown.  Tera can't connect to Bedford and wait for someone else to connect to Charlottetown.  I have to have you connecting at the same time.  So these switches are connecting all the time simultaneously.  So I have to have these switches connecting all the time.  In this particular program I have a stay alive logic which means that once I connect to the switch once in the morning it will stay connected to that switch until 4:00 in the morning.  At this time I disconnect them to do some routine stuff afterwards.  In terms of calls out of here, I have about a 100 users on this system and its probably going to be  more than that; I expect about a 125 users in total.  I have to set them up not only in this system but I also have to set them up on the server.  The server in this building is small and it looks like a double sized, hard drive without a monitor, but it  is in fact extremely powerful.  I had to set all these users up   on that system but I also had to set them up on the application that is running on top of the users as well.  I have to maintain all these users.  If something happens and you forget your login or you forget your password, then I have to change your password if you forget it.  Or if something happens and you honestly can't get in, then I have to figure out why you can't get in.
 
On this one program, the reps can do different things.  There are different reports that they can get.  We call it station administration.  Basically what we are doing is taking station statistics for the centrex system.  These are all the different reports that they can print off without a problem.  Now, for example, if they want to produce a new report and it's not here then I have to go into a programming language a unix's programming language and write a new report because they might want a new report two years or two months down the road.  Or they might want to see something different on their report.  I do that work behind the scenes.
 
There are different utilities in every program.  This is the utility that tells me about the oracle data base - how much free space I have and who my users are - different things like that. It's very realistic when I'm looking at it because I know what I'm looking for but anyone else looking at it would go - "what is that?"
 
The cpu is the central processing unit.  When you click on a key and before you see it on a screen it has to go through cpu to be reconfigured to come out as a letter etc.  Computers only work in 1 and 0; that's all a computer really knows.  It doesn't know anything else.  It's really a dumb machine.  From those 1's and 0"s, it creates letters depending on the combinations we have.
 
This is a cpu performance monitor.  It lets me know what is going on in the cpu.  It lets me know how much cpu is being used.  It shows me the percentage.  The high point means lots of activity.  The low point means not much use.
 
Overall I'm monitoring the system, making sure its alive, talking to the network, connecting to all the switches, making sure that all the service reps that need any work done can still get in and do their work.  I am writing any reports that need to be written.  I'll write those reports, and make sure they are out there in working order.
 
If something happens to the system and it dies in the middle of the night, I'm paid to come out and work on it.  In this particular system the server is on North Street and I would have to go and sign myself in.  I would have to go there and make sure it was fixed because it is a no outage system.  It is not allowed to be off line at any time.  It has to be on at all times.  As a result it's a 7 hour to 24 hour operation; that's what I do.  I work here in the office for 7 and a half hours.  After that I'm on call until the next morning I'm back in the office.  I'm on  call on the weekends which means I have to have my laptop at home with me or be available to be in the office within fifteen minutes of being called or paged.  They have my pager number, cell number and I have to answer at all times.
 
When I go on vacation, I have to make sure that someone else knows the system who can handle my job.  When I'm on course, I take my laptop with me.  We do not have enough staff in this area to have backups.  This is one of my key areas.  No one else knows this system.  I haven't trained anyone on it yet.  I'm responsible 100% for this system at all times until I cross train someone.  Then once I do I can have them for a back up.  But I'm the primary person.
 
I'll take you to another system, the octel voice messaging system.  I'll take you out to the district; this particular one is one of the octel voice messaging systems.  There are two of them for the district.  In Nova Scotia we classify for the district outside of Halifax.  We have two major seer boxes that hold all the telephone numbers connected to one server.  We pull reports and information on this system.  This server emails me information about the different jobs running etc.  I'm collecting stats from the boxes all the time.  I know when you are making 3 way calls.  I collect that information and send it on to the billing department.  It costs you 35 cents each call.
At month's end when you get your bill or your parents get their bill that information will be on there.  This system also has the two systems on the island as well as the district.  Halifax has three boxes and we're putting in a fourth box next weekend.  I have to work.  We are putting the fourth box in because we are overloaded over the three we already have.  We need the space.
 
This (points to a place on the screen) shows me that there is a job already started and kicked off.  It's collecting information from this particular cluster, and getting ready to do uploading to data base.  But I've already collected all of the information out of the switch.  I've done everything that has been processed within the last hour.  It does all that and then I uploaded into the data base.  So it sits there until I run a job at night to extract all that information for billing.
 
I have 16 jobs that run against this one switch alone.  So I have to be emailed 16x for that one particular switch.  So on the district one, I start at 6:00 in the morning running jobs and I go up until 11:00pm.  Now between 8:00 and 11:00 at night I don't do any jobs at that point because I allow the 11:00 job to pull everything from 8:00 onwards.  From 8 to 12 I do everything because I have the whole night to finish it off in because I don't start running jobs again until 6 in the morning...but every hour from six onward I basically run a job.  I have to maintain this because they can't allow the jobs to fail.  When you are maintaining a system basically at this point, you are a troubleshooter.  Either you know the answer right away or you have to do some investigation into it and perhaps recreate new links.
 
I found out yesterday at a meeting that I have to create a  new data base for next week.  On this job you find out last minute details.  All of a sudden I have to do something by the end of an hour, by the end of the day, beginning of day.  The first thing I do when I come in in the morning is pull up email to see if my jobs ran properly during the night because if not then I have to find out why and make sure they run again  properly.  If I do get one that says something like the job ended overnight, I have to sit down and figure the problem out.  It could be something really simple like there is not enough space to do everything that you were asking for, or it could be something like bad data.  I have to actually go in and  physically remove the bad data from the program so it can run again.  This job is totally different depending on what you are doing at the time.  One of the key jobs for the octel system is to keep it running constantly for both residential and business clients.  Business clients always need it up and running.  Businesses hate paying for a service that does not run all the time without any problems.
 
My systems are all year 2000 compliant.  In February we cut to a new platform or a new service order and billing system which is not year 2000 compliant yet.  They have to have it compliant by June.  We have a link project which is a graphical user interface again which allows people to link to different applications a lot easier.  Then we have the compliance project which is the year 2000 project.  There is a whole team established for that because what they have to do is go into every system that we have in this company and make sure it is year 2000 compliant.  If not, it has to be reprogrammed or recoded or changed.  They couldn't do it to my systems.  I had to do it to my own systems and do upgrades to them.  So to the octel system in August, I wiped everything out, took a good backup of everything and started from scratch with a new operating system upgraded for the year 2000.  After that it took almost a week to load.  It was interesting, quite fun and frustrating.
 
What I like best about my job is learning about computers and trying to fix things.  It is a good field if you like  computers.  Basically it's a fix job.  If you don't mind sitting down and logically thinking about what to do next, you will enjoy it.  To fix something you need to go from here to here to here.  So basically the logic aspect of this job is really important.  For example, you want to get from Guysborough to the TransCanada Highway.  There are quite a few different routes to take to get up to the highway.  So logically you have to think which way do you want to go.  Which way is the fastest way, which way is the longest way, which way would be the more economical way.  You have to start thinking about all the different aspects.  So you basically have to look at the problem and say this is the problem and this is what I want it to look like.  How do I get it from this point to this point.  But you can't go off the beaten track.  You have to do it in a very logical way.  If you go in a straight line down, and get your problem fixed, you're fine.  But if you go off you might create another problem that you have to fix.  You have to get back on track again.  It's actually trying to decide what you want to do.  If you are a very logical thinker, you are probably good with computers.
 
I get a lot of satisfaction from finding solutions or routes which are the best and the fastest.  You want to have the best route possible and know exactly what you did and also the quickest route because you don't want it to be too complicated when you have to train someone else.  You have to train them on it.  If it takes them all that while to get there, they're going to get frustrated too.  Really, truly, you guys have no idea what I'm doing to watch me do this.
 
The first week on the job I was totally frustrated and everything seemed foreign to me.  It took me a whole day to fix my first problem.  Six months later it would take me 5 minutes to fix.  It's the learning curve of it.  The satisfaction is knowing that you can do it and it's a job well done afterwards.
 
The network side is very demanding.  It's growing rapidly and we do not have enough people for it.  A lot of people are moving to the States because you can make big bucks down there.  You can actually go down saying this is the salary I'm looking for.  Probably they will end up giving it to you because they are so short staffed.  With the Free Trade Agreement that went through, we can go down without a problem.  You don't need the degree because they are shortstaffed in that particular area.  The main frame aspect is a dying aspect.  A lot of people are getting into fixing computers, and helping people.   Help desks are becoming very popular in most avenues and areas because when you are doing a job you don't want to think about fixing the computer or doing this and that.  You only want to do your job and they have it broken down into all different areas.  So it is quite interesting.
 
At the Bishop Tower you actually get to see the insides of a computer.  One side of my job is here and I work on a screen.  I don't rip anything apart.  The other side of my job is at North Street where I put a computer together.  I put a server together and order a circuit and everything.  You are underneath the floor doing your connections because all your power is underneath the floor.  It's a little bit scary, a little bit short, and you're always bending over.  You have to have a flashlight because the floor is a raised floor.  Your computer room has to be cold.  Unfortunately, if you don't like the cold, it's not an area to get into.  The temperature has to stay about 60-62 degrees at all times.
 
There are two different aspects to my job that I find satisfying.  When I am over here working on my computer screen on programs, I am talking to customers, other people, and I'm doing things for them.  You get that true satisfaction when they say thank-you very much you made my day.  But when you order the equipment in and you get to see the equipment and you are ripping open the boxes, it's just like Christmas.  It's like this is new and it's going to be fun.  That aspect of it is fun because you get to do all the work on it.  It's your baby and it's brand new.  It's really a gratifying moment when you've got it all set up and are going to do work on it.  I like both those sides of it; I really enjoy helping customers out there and doing something on my own that is challenging.
(Cynthia then took us over to the Help Department.)
 
This is the help desk area.  The six individuals who work at the help desk can see on their screens any of the screens of any  of the PCs (about 600) they are responsible for fixing or troubleshooting for.
 
Then we went to the Desk Top Support room where a desk top support worker explained his job of physically fixing the insides of the computers themselves.  The help desk staff and the desk top support staff are entry level positions requiring a college degree or diploma.  What problems the help desk cannot solve over the phone, they send over to Desk Top Support.  Here they are responsible for fixing the old equipment and ordering any new equipment they may need.  Cynthia has to come here to get the information about the LANsystem she needs in order to set up the server.
 
Then we were given a tour of the communication or coms room where a server gathers information to send it out of the floor.
 

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