Alice (Dilbert)

Alice
Dilbert character
Created by Scott Adams
Voiced by Alison Martin (Dilbert's Desktop Games)
Kathy Griffin (TV series, uncredited)
Information
Species Human
Gender Female
Nationality American

Alice is an engineer from the Dilbert comic strip. She is one of Dilbert's co-workers in the department. She has long curly hair, which transformed into a large and distinctive triangular hairstyle when the character became a regular. Her character was based on a former co-worker of cartoonist Scott Adams.[1]

Appearance

Before Alice became a fictional regular character, there were a variety of generic fluffy haired women at Path-E-Tech. Many of them had bit parts and were only used one or two times. The name Alice was used at least once, in a series of strips where she was forced to give birth to a baby at the office. Some of these characters had personalities very similar to the later Alice; these characters eventually disappeared when Alice began to be featured regularly. Like the Pointy-Haired Boss, Alice's hairstyle became more distinct over time. More recent female bit parts have smooth, semicircle hair. The first time that Alice could be seen with her typical pink suit and curly triangle hair was on August 25, 1992.[2] In the summer of 2010, Alice's regular work uniform changed from her trademark pink suit to a turtleneck and a black skirt.

Personality

Alice is depicted as being one of the hardest-working engineers in the comic. She was at one time the highest paid engineer in the company,[3] and on another occasion she was feted for receiving her fourteenth patent.[4] She stands in contrast with Wally, who does no work and receives nearly the same reward.

Alice suffers all the problems of being a female engineer. She has no tolerance for the discrimination she experiences, but she has little sympathy for other women who claim to be the victim of such discrimination, generally considering herself to be better than them.[3]

Alice is fractionally more successful in her social life than fellow employees. She has dated numerous times, although Dilbert alluded to her having a family when Catbert created a family friendly policy,[5] and she used to date a one-eyed carpenter.[6] She was almost into a committed relationship with an emotionally supportive man but turned him down at the last minute, as she decided it would be more cost-effective to train monkeys to do the same work. It was also implied that she had a child,[7] and actually gave birth to a child in the office[8] but the idea was eventually phased out. She later dated a robotic copy of the boss that was meant to spew encouragement on the employees when the real PHB was too lazy to do so. In the TV series, Alice enters an abusive relationship with the testing supervisor, Bob Bastard, in which Bob asks her for her clothes, her shoes, and her car. They break up when she sees him slurping his coffee and commenting on how rewarding it is to know that Alice hates it when he does so.

Alice has a short temper. Her anger is frequently expressed in physical violence, most often manifested in the form of her "Fist of Death". Adams once said that he tries to have her kill about one person a year. She has, among other things, kicked an Elbonian into his own hat,[9] stuffed Asok into his shirt sleeve and punched him into the ceiling, drop-kicked a computer off the building (killing a major customer),[10] rigged a paper shredder to kill the department's resident "sadistic nut",[11] and once sling-shot a man with his suspenders so hard he traveled forward in time.[12] When the company moved to a high-crime neighborhood to save costs, she took it upon herself to mug the company's executives to make them re-consider their decision.[13]

According to Catbert, she has not been fired for any of this because she "did not discriminate, sexually harass, steal or take drugs". He then gave her an award for her "cost-saving idea" of killing a co-worker.[14]

Occasionally, other coworkers would use her anger to their or the company's advantage. Once, Wally got her to bend a metal bar into a u-shape by telling Alice it was an award he got for "being male".[15] Also once, Dilbert called her to his cubicle to subtly get her to make a colleague in the cubicle next to him stop whistling.[16] In one 2008 strip series involving the company building killer robots, Dogbert used his rumor-spreading technique to tell Alice the robots said her hair was unfashionable and she was overpaid, and thus she punched all the robots to death with her "fist of death".[17]

References

  1. ↑ "Dilbert Character Inspired by SDSM&T Alum" (PDF). South Dakota School Of Mines And Technology Quarterly Winter 1998. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2013-02-27.
  2. ↑ http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1992-08-25/
  3. 1 2 Strip on March 16, 1998: http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1998-03-16/
  4. ↑ Strip on March 18, 1998: http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1998-03-18/
  5. ↑ Strip on April 22, 1997: http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1997-04-22/
  6. ↑ Strip on September 2, 2001: http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2001-09-02/
  7. ↑ Strip on April 23, 1997: http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1997-04-23/
  8. ↑ http://dilbert.com/strip/1991-08-06
  9. ↑ Strip on March 28, 1995: http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1995-03-28/
  10. ↑ Strips on May 5, 2001 (http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2001-05-05/) and May 7, 2001 (http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2001-05-07/)
  11. ↑ Strip on January 5, 1999: http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1999-01-05/
  12. ↑ Strip on November 16, 1995: http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1995-11-16/
  13. ↑ Strips on March 11 (http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2005-03-11/), 12 (http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2005-03-12/), 14 (http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2005-03-14/), and 15(http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2005-03-15/), 2005
  14. ↑ Strip on June 2, 1999: http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1999-06-02/
  15. ↑ Strip on July 23, 2003: http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2003-07-23/
  16. ↑ Strip on June 17, 2007: http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2007-06-17/
  17. ↑ Strip on November 14, 2008: http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2008-11-14/

External links

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