WORKING AT COMMS VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Megan Ruru (Fire Service): Obviously being able to protect the community, people’s lives, and their property, is a number one for myself. And then the lifestyle of the job, the team camaraderie that we have in our small groups of shifts is just fantastic. You know when you have to do the work the work gets done, but at the same time you can still have a little fun because you’ve got to understand our shifts are 12 hours and we do spend a lot of time together. So being able to get on with one another, being a tight knit bunch, that’s pretty much what I love about this job.
Amanda Welch (Ambulance): I am really, really passionate about what I do. I really believe what I do. I know what I do rocks. It’s a cool job. It’s a stressful job, it’s a hard job, but it’s so rewarding. It’s cool, I’m proud to be in this uniform.
Carol Ott (Police): It’s exciting, it’s challenging, it’s rewarding. That’s why I like it. We are definitely a family. We see probably more of each other on our sections than we do of our family. We make very close relationships. We socialise together. Probably because we have the same feelings that we share when someone’s had a job that’s upset them, so we know how they feel. We don’t have to have things explained to us, we know. And we’re very much a big family up here.
Megan: The training – initially when you join you do a training course which teaches you all the skills that you need to be able to do the job that incorporate using computers, people skills, being able to talk to your callers, different behaviours that you might come across. So the training, you are taught everything that you need to do prior to going live on the phones.
Amanda: You never know one day from the other. You can walk in in the morning and get emergency calls straight away and you can get people screaming down the phone and to be able to calm them down. The adrenaline that goes through you when you are trying to help them, and the accomplishment to get information out of them when they’re hysterical, is just rewarding. You can’t beat that. No other job does that.
Carol: I suppose you could say that when something happens on the floor, everybody is acutely aware of it and we do help each other. What happens to one person may not affect somebody in quite the same way but we’re all acutely aware of what’s going on on the floor and what each other are feeling and coping with.
[End]
