Switchboard to iPad, Sipa has seen it all

St. Bernards Senior Vice President of Administrative Services Kevin Hodges presented Sipa with a plaque to commemorate her time at St. Bernards.

“Can you image all she has seen through the years,” Hodges laughed, noting that she has had to deal with a lot of changes, not only at the hospital, but also in technology.

At 74-years-old Sipa said on Tuesday that she has dealt with everything from old-time switchboards to computers to cell phones over the years.

Although Sipa has spent the majority of her life in Jonesboro, she said that she actually immigrated from Poland when she was a little girl with her parents, Jozeph and Stefania Sipa, and one of her sisters ... and she said she has quite a few siblings, nine in total.

Her mother was a housewife, Sipa recalled, and her father was a butcher by trade.

In fact, he was a master butcher in Poland, but he had to take a job at a packing plant when he got to America, she noted.

Which is how they landed in Jonesboro, she said, when he started at Broadway Packing.

He eventually got to start his own shop called S&H Meat Market, which was located downtown on Cate Street, Sipa proudly recalled.

Sipa started part-time at St. Bernards on Nov. 8, 1967, as a second-shift switchboard operator, while also working part-time at another job and attending Arkansas State University.

“I was so nervous,” Sipa laughed. “I had never operated a switchboard. The only phones were in private rooms, nurses’ stations and offices, but there were still a lot of phones and we had to connect all the calls to them.”

In fact, she said that she almost got fired right off the bat.

The employee who was training her had to go help a cashier, however the woman had forgotten to tell her how to know if a line was busy.

Which left Sipa having to explain a botched connection to a supervisor.

“She just looked at me and said ... you are lucky that you answered my question the way you did or you’d be out the door,” Sipa laughed as she though back on her awkward explanation to the woman.

However, she didn’t give up and she continued on the switchboard, before transitioning to a cashier position for a short time.

In 1969, Sipa gave birth to her beautiful baby girl, Andrea Howard, who was born with hydrocephalus, which Sipa explained is an abnormal buildup of fluid within the brain.

Now with a disabled infant and a full-time job, Sipa would not be able return to college, after already completing her first two years at Arkansas State University, but that didn’t stop her.

Sipa would continue at St. Bernards and would return to the switchboards as a supervisor a short while later, a position that she would remain in until shoulder surgery forced her to step back down to an operator in 2001.

“In fact, I got my naturalization papers while I was working the switchboard,” Sipa stated.

In 1976, two of her fellow operators would join her as her witnesses in an upstairs courtroom of the old Jonesboro Post Office as she went in front of the naturalization judge.

“He was so scary. Even the girls that went with me were terrified of him,” she laughed as she recalled them struggled to speak and tell him their names.

“But, I did it. I answered all his questions and I was naturalized in 1977,” Sipa bragged proudly of her citizenship.

Sipa still recalls when the hospital got it’s first neurosurgeon in 1986.

“It was wonderful, not only for the hospital but for me and Andrea too. With her hydrocephalus, it was a miracle,” she said, noting that they didn’t have to drive all the way to Memphis anymore.

“All the growth has been amazing to watch,” she smiled thinking back. “Not only all the construction and growth to the hospital, but also the technology and advancements that have been made over the years.”

“I still remember my first computer here,” she recalled. “It was a dummy terminal. It was just for looking up patient information ... nothing else.”

“It was the early 2000s and I had a better computer at home,” she laughed.

In 2007, she transitioned once again as she started setting up cell phones and iPads for hospital employees, as well as handling the trouble calls when people had technical issues.

“I had to do it all ... from phone repair to setting installations with Ritter,” Sipa laughed as she showed off her meticulous files, even pulling out an old notebook from the 90s.

Sipa is very proud of her time at the hospital and said that St. Bernards is her second family.

“I will cry when I don’t have to come back in anymore,” she stated as she wiped her eye.

Even though today is her last day, she said she will continue to work PRN as they need her.