Alice (Dilbert character)
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Alice is a hard-working 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 colleague of cartoonist Scott Adams.[1]
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[edit] Problems and successes experienced
Alice is rarely rewarded for her hard work, although she was for a time the highest paid engineer in the company. At another time she was feted for receiving her seventeenth patent. She stands in contrast with Wally, who does no work and is rewarded nearly the same. Alice also suffers all the problems of being a female engineer. She has no tolerance for the discrimination she experiences. However, she also has little sympathy for other women who claim to be the victim of such discrimination when in fact they refuse to work as hard as she does. The revelations about her being the highest paid engineer at the company and the party for her seventeenth patent were responses to complaints from female co-workers about how they could not get ahead at the company.
Alice is fractionally more successful in her social life than fellow employees. She has dated numerous times, and she used to date a one-eyed carpenter. 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.
[edit] Alice's violent nature
Alice has a short temper. Her anger is frequently expressed in physical violence, most often manifested in the form of her "fist of death". In the comic strip she has, among other things, kicked an Elbonian into his own hat, stuffed Asok into his shirt sleeve and punched him into the ceiling, drop-kicked a computer off the building (killing a major customer), rigged a paper shredder to kill the company sadist, ripped out a man's heart through his throat and sold it on the Internet (and later said he 'kinda' gave her permission to do so by messing up one of her projects and saying "it's better to seek forgiveness than to ask for approval"), punched her fist clear through a co-worker's head when he wanted to ask a question at a long meeting and once sling-shot a man with his suspenders so hard he traveled forward in time. Adams once said that he tries to have her kill about one person a year.On the television series, she has used Wally to clean up a coffee spill, stuffed him bodily into a copier, and punched a hole through a conference table so she could yank him face first onto it by grabbing his tie.
Alice has also thrown the Pointy-Haired Boss a fairly long distance as a result of her annual performance review, after threatening to yank him out of his cheap suit and hurl his naked body down the hall; Dilbert and Wally have noted that her distance improves every year. She even received a bonus from Catbert for killing a co-worker with her "Fist of Death." She occasionally claims to have superpowers. She has also exploded the head of the Improper Comment man by cussing the words learnt from her one-time boyfriend the one-eyed carpenter. When the company moved to a high crime neighbourhood to save costs, she took it upon herself to mug the company's executives to make them re-consider their decision.
In a comic that ran in December of 2003 she was diagnosed with Carpal Punchel syndrome and was forced to stop using her Fist of Death for two weeks (replacing it with the only "Slightly menacing" Foot of Death.) Ironically she was fired in a strip that ran two weeks later and was later rehired.
The women in the strip, in general, tend to be aggressive and sometimes violent, whereas the men are mostly meek and mild. Some observers might see this as a modern incarnation of the ancient sitcom staple of the henpecked husband. However, it may also be that it is politically safer to let women do violence. Adams is one of many cartoonists who admired Charles Schulz. In the Peanuts comic strip, Lucy was often violent, either "slugging" Linus or threatening to. As Schulz once explained, "There is nothing funny about a little boy teasing a little girl, but there is something funny about a little girl teasing a little boy".[citation needed]
[edit] References
[edit] External links
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