Description: Linda manages the computer helpdesk at Oxford University. She talks about her experience at an IT lab in Germany and how she applied this in Oxford, and she gives us a glimpse of the changing world of IT and the challenges Oxford IT services are facing.

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What I do

Linda: Yes, I work for Oxford University Computing Services, and we're in one of the conference rooms that belongs to the Computing Services. And within the Computing Services I manage the helpdesk, which is a sort of standard computer helpdesk where people can come in and ask questions about computers and try and get their problems sorted out.
Sabine: So who comes to see you or phones in?
Linda: We support anyone who is a member of Oxford University, it doesn't matter whether they're a student, a professor, a gardener, a cook, as long as they are an official member of Oxford University, i.e. they're studying here or they're employed by the University, then we provide computing support for them.
[ video ] [ exercises for this topic ] Word count: 117 Duration: 0m47

How Computing Services evolved

Sabine: And how did you come to do this job, I mean, what got you started on this job?
Linda: I actually started in Oxford University as a Teaching Officer, so rather than helping with people's problems, I was giving computer training. I did this for my first two years here and then around that time a project started to reorganise the support services that we were offering because they were very fragmented. We had a special desk for registration problems, which meant mostly forgotten passwords, but also issues of needing a new computer account to a user, a new computer in a different way. And that was completely separate from, say, problems with running computer software, which would be a separate desk. Or problems with computer hardware, i.e. 'my CD drive doesn't work', or 'my computer won't boot up', that was a third desk, and we also had specialised support for people working in the humanities, who tended to need extra support in terms of working with fonts and getting unusual scripts etc. to print out properly. We were finding that, for the users, it was a bit difficult to work out exactly which of these many desks they had to go to with which problem. So, after I'd been here for about two years that was the time when we started looking at those different services and how we could possibly combine them into one. And I ended up being one of two people who took over the management of the new combined service, and this is mainly because of the experience I had from a previous job, where I was doing helpdesk sort of work in Germany in a scientific lab.
[ video ] [ exercises for this topic ] Word count: 282 Duration: 1m57

The support services we provide

Sabine: What are the main things that people want to know at the moment and has that shifted over the years, I mean the support needs that people have with computers?
Linda: We do see some shifts. Forgotten passwords are still the top runner, unfortunately. We have worked a bit on this to make it easier for people to change their own passwords, so it's come down a little bit since then but there's an awful lot of forgotten passwords. We're seeing less questions about Microsoft Word, for example. We used to have a fair number of those, we still get some, but it's shifting more towards making web pages and working with multimedia, tends to be graphics and editing videos and so on, getting more questions in that direction. And also more questions in terms of 'my computer doesn't work properly, it won't start up, it won't run, it won't ... ' and often due to viruses unfortunately. We're seeing more virus damage now than, say, three years ago.
[ video ] [ exercises for this topic ] Word count: 166 Duration: 1m06

Computer viruses as a prevailing challenge

Sabine: Is your department also responsible for protecting the University, or is that a different area?
Linda: One of my colleagues has that as sort of half his job, is to work with anti-virus software, so we have a sort of partnership with a large anti-virus company and provide that software free within the University. I mean the University as a whole pays for it but each individual department or college doesn't have to foot the bill for that, it's paid from a central budget. /
Sabine: Do you think people are becoming more aware of it? Do they behave differently?
Linda: Yes. We are finally getting to the point where when we ask someone, 'Do you have anti-virus software?' they say 'yes' instead of giving us a blank stare, as they did a couple of years ago. So that is improving, people are more aware of viruses, the fact that you have to have anti-virus software on your computer has been accepted everywhere. But then viruses are shifting as well, so there's still large areas that people are just not aware of, the way viruses can fake the sending address; lots of people don't realise that, so if they get an e-mail from an address they trust, they're much more likely to open the message.
[ video ] [ exercises for this topic ] Word count: 211 Duration: 1m22

My daily routines

Sabine: Do you have ... In your job, do you have any sort of daily routine at all? Or does it change?
Linda: Yes, there is some routine in it. I mean, as the Helpdesk Manager I'm not necessarily sitting there ... out there on the helpdesk all the time, but I do provide telephone backup. So when it gets very busy on the desk, the phone will ring in my office. So it's very, very rare that a day will go by where I won't at least be taking a few support phone calls, first-line support phone calls. The other thing that I do on a very regular basis is monitor the e-mails that are coming in from people asking questions via e-mail and I'm almost always picking up a few of those, if not quite a chunk of them, it depends on how complicated the questions are as to whether I take them.
Sabine: And apart from that, the rest of your job, what are you doing?
Linda: I suppose another sort of routine thing is that I have to make sure that we always have the correct staffing level on the desk, so we normally have two people sitting on the desk during our core hours between 10 and 5, so every morning I sort of check if anyone who's supposed to be on the desk is ill and then try to find someone to fill in if they are ill, and fill in myself if I can't find anyone.
[ video ] [ exercises for this topic ] Word count: 247 Duration: 1m19

Growing up in a multilingual environment

Sabine: Something else I meant to ask you is how would you describe your accent?
Linda: My accent? Mid-Atlantic I would say.
Sabine: So how come?
Linda: My mother is British, but I was born in the States, so I suppose I did learn to speak British English first from my mother, although I'm told that as a little three-year-old I had a Swiss accent. My father is German-speaking Swiss, and my parents were quite concerned that I would end up with a Swiss accent when I speak English even though I couldn't speak Swiss – but that disappeared fairly quickly. And I went to elementary school, to sort of first-level in school in America, and picked up an American accent there, and if you hear me talking to an American, I do sound very American but I kept a British 'tinge' to my accent because my mother always disliked the American accent, so I toned it down for her and that's the accent that I use when I'm in Britain. British people generally feel this sounds American, or possibly Canadian, whereas Americans generally feel this sounds pretty British to them. So it must be somewhere in between. Someone once thought I had British vowels and American consonants, so maybe that's why it sounds like it's a mix.
Sabine: And how do you feel? Do you feel more American or more British in the meantime?
Linda: It's quite difficult for me to pin that down. I don't really think that way. I think that if I'd stayed in America, I would feel American, but I left America when I was about 22 and I haven't been back very often since then, so I don't really feel American anymore.
[ video ] [ exercises for this topic ] Word count: 281 Duration: 1m53

Working abroad

Linda: I ended up working in Germany after I'd finished my degree, mainly because I'd worked there as a summer student. My parents were already working in the lab that I ended up working in and I ... they got me a summer position and once I'd finished my degree I went back to my boss then and said 'do you have anything to keep me busy?'. And after I'd been working there for about six months, doing mostly programming, my colleagues were once again sitting around their table drinking their tea and talking about the support services they had and how they weren't working very well, the main problem being that they consisted of a schedule with Mr Müller on Monday morning and Mr Schmidt on Monday afternoon etc. And the user would have to look at this table and work out whose turn it was when we had a problem and go in and ask the appropriate person – only, half the time they'd forgotten that they were supposed to be there on Tuesday morning. So it really wasn't working very well. And every now and then we would have these discussions about how one could improve it and have a central office. With dedicated office hours, there would always be someone there, and wouldn't that be a good idea, and everyone would look round the table and say 'so who's going to do that?' – And typical! ‘Terribly busy, can't!' And so I stuck my hand up and volunteered as a little 22-year-old among all the 40- to 50-year-olds who were there. And they said 'fine, go ahead' and supported me a bit with training to get me up to speed on the mainframe computer that we were using at the time. And I enjoyed the work and it expanded to the point where I wasn't the only one doing it. We started having more people and started hiring students and so on. And then of course once I'd moved to Oxford as a trainer in IT things and it once again came to 'the support services aren't working very well, we need to improve them,' again, I was the one who ended up saying 'OK, I'll do that.'
Sabine: So this is how you slid in the job?
Linda: Yes. And I mean I did actually spend about ten years in Germany doing that sort of work, it wasn't the only thing I did but it was about half ... about half my working hours in Germany were spent doing that. And it was a multilingual help desk as well because the people were ... it was a scientific research lab with people from all over the World, China, Germany, Russia, Poland, you name it. And, English was basically the common language. So the helpdesk had to speak English. But then quite a lot of the technicians and secretaries who worked there as well were not that comfortable with English. So, you know, it was quite important that you had the German-speaking skills as well. So it was a multilingual helpdesk.
[ video ] [ exercises for this topic ] Word count: 507 Duration: 2m57

Computing power for the users

Sabine: As you said, ten years ago, or twenty years ago whatever, they had these mainframes, and now do you have any mainframes at all there at the moment?
Linda: In the University?
Sabine: Yes.
Linda: It's actually moving more in the direction of having a virtual distributed mainframe in that ... particularly the sciences still have a need for huge computing power. Much more than you can get out of a desktop. And rather than having a huge IBM or Cray sitting there, the direction that computing is moving in is that the extra computing power that's available from ... I mean there may be larger machines than desktop PC's, but they're not on the sort of major scale that we used to have, the so-called 'mainframe'. But these computers would donate their extra computing power to a sort of world-wide virtual machine and you would then be able to run your program, distributed around the world, on wherever the computing power happens to be available. And that's a project that Oxford is working on, e-Science, and of course a lot of other universities and scientific labs around the world.
Sabine: So that's an international project supporting mobility of researchers and this kind of thing?
Linda: Yes, because I mean the ultimate goal is that you should be able to access your data that comes from your experiment, no matter where you are in the world, be able to run your program and access the computing power that you need, no matter where you are.
[ video ] [ exercises for this topic ] Word count: 248 Duration: 1m40

Access-from-anywhere project

Sabine: But yeah I was wondering whether this all has to do with ... you know, mobility is growing, and this kind of thing.
Linda: Yes, we're certainly finding that support issues become more complicated because the people who are calling us up are not in Oxford, you know, they're in India on some sort of a field trip and they need to have access to journals and research materials that are stored here in Oxford and that are restricted. Because of licensing conditions and so on, we can't make the material available to just everyone, and it becomes kind of complicated then for people to sort of prove who they are so that they can get to the materials that they need access to.
Sabine: Of course. Lots of challenges.
Linda: That's another challenge.
Sabine: That's another challenge, OK, good. Thanks very much.
Linda: Good.
Sabine: That's great.
Linda: You're welcome.
[ video ] [ exercises for this topic ] Word count: 143 Duration: 0m53

List of speakers

Acknowledgements, availability and copyright

Acknowledgements: The project has been supported by the University of Tuebingen. The video interviews have been carried out and recorded by Sabine Braun, Stefanie Hahn, Petra Hoffstaedter and Kurt Kohn. The speakers have agreed to the use of the materials for non-commercial research and education purposes.

Availability of the ELISA corpus: The ELISA corpus is made available by the Department of Applied English Linguistics at the University of Tuebingen. It is freely available at this website for study, teaching and research purposes, and copies of the transcripts may be distributed, as long as this statement of availability appears in the text. However, if any portion of this material is to be used in educational presentations and publications, permission must be obtained in advance. Commercial use of any form is excluded. For further information about permissions, please contact Dr. Sabine Braun at s.braun(at)surrey.ac.uk.

Copyright of the ELISA corpus: Department of Applied English Linguistics, University of Tuebingen.