We are lost in the murky depths of cyber space searching for the proverbial needle in a haystack. But there is help at hand - Eimear Ni Dhonnchadha is on the job. A problem solver, she delves courageously into the techno haystack. She is an ace trouble-shooter working for Apple Computers in Cork.
"Yes," Ni Dhonnchadha agrees, "I'm a bit like Inspector Morse or Poirot." She spends her days picking up clues and vital pieces of information, working to a deadline until she finally pins down the problem. Throughout the day as a technical support engineer at Apple's Cork base, the company's European centre, she handles technical queries and phone calls from 29 countries around Europe.
Ni Dhonnchadha deals with queries about software products. The queries come in from far-flung Apple users in Poland or Israel, from Turkey or Russia, not to mention more familiar places in France, Italy, Spain and Germany.
"We have to try and locate the problem," she explains. "Then we replicate it. Then we narrow it down to what file or what part of the software it is in. Then we go in and check to see if everything is all right and pin it down. Then we edit the actual code of the programme and we fix it."
Even though her first view of a computer was in Leaving Cert her interest in mathematical problems goes much further back, she says. "We all had a leaning towards maths at school," she says about her family.
Eimear Ni Dhonnchadha grew up in the Banteer area of Co Cork. She went to school at Scoil Mhuire, Kanturk, Co Cork. "I had no particular gra for physics but I said I'd give it a shot. When I went into the Leaving Cert cycle, I took all the science subjects and by the end of fifth year I had a fair idea that I liked it. I preferred electronics to anything else within physics. I narrowed it down that way."
Ni Dhonnchadha started the fouryear B Engineering in electronic engineering in Cork RTC in 1992. The area is still male-dominated - there were just two females in her year out of a total of 35. In fourth year she took part in the EU-funded New Opportunities for Women (NOW) programme, which tries to encourage women to go into new areas.
The field of electronic engineering is "so vast," she says. On leaving college, the choice of job opportunity is wide. Graduates can decide to specialise in areas including software, hardware, communications and process control engineering.
The course at Cork RTC was "totally different to what we had done at school. It was all new maths and new physics. I preferred that to what I had done. In first and second year it was going great. In third year the work started piling on - it was the amount of it rather than anything else. By fourth year we were in the swing of it. It was much more practical."
During the first two years there were lab sessions and mini-projects. "By fourth year you had to do a project which was about 40 per cent of your final year. My project was designing a software licensing programme."
Ni Dhonnchadha started in Apple as a quality engineer. "My job was to test the quality of the products coming on the market. I was doing that up to last January. Then I designed a database for the Apple European Localisataion Group." She is now support engineer to the group.
Her job is full of change, challenge and bouts of intensity. She enjoys her work "because you're not stuck inside a computer all day. You're talking to people. You're not totally zonked at the end of the day. You're kept alert by all the things that are going on."
Sometimes a problem arrives for which she knows the solution immediately . . . "but most of the time you have to sit down and find the problem. You check it against other types of software. You're a troubleshooter. You pin it down. Then, once you're sure, you delve into it and root around. It's technical. You have to use your head. When you start you're so used to pinpointing it that you nearly know by instinct."
