| Wally | |
|---|---|
| Dilbert character | |
| Created by | Scott Adams |
| Portrayed by | Gordon Hunt (TV series) |
| Information | |
| Species | Human |
| Gender | Male |
Wally is a character from the Dilbert comic strip, a lazy employee always trying to work the system.
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Wally was inspired by a coworker of creator Scott Adams at Pacific Bell. In Seven Years of Highly Defective People and What Would Wally Do, Adams explained that his co-worker at Pacific Bell had made a judgment call gone bad, so management froze him at his position and pay scale rather than fire him. Then Pacific Bell started offering a generous severance package for the lowest ten-percent of workers, so the coworker, knowing he was pretty much hinted to leave the company and knowing it was better to leave the company with money than without, was given an incentive to become a low performing worker. Adams was inspired by this co-worker's serious dedication toward this goal, and the concept of a completely shameless employee with no sense of loyalty became Wally.
Another co-worker of Adams provided the inspiration for the "Wally Report" (see below).
In early strips, there were characters who resembled Wally in appearance and had bit parts, not unlike Ted the Generic Guy. Some of the more memorable ones include Bud, a cynical engineer who broke the spirit of a newcomer; Les, a short-tempered, short man who clashed with Dilbert and other co-workers; Johnson, who failed a drug test by testing positive for Diet Pepsi and Cheetos; and Norman, who was "snorted" by a woman with a huge nose. This was referenced in a comic where the company's biggest customer was killed, and the PHB announced a plan to have one of the employees impersonate him, when the Boss held up a picture of him, he was revealed to be identical to Wally, who recognized and identified him as "Willy from the club of people who look exactly like me". The true Wally did not appear until October 21, 1991, when Adams wrote in the co-worker's story of attempting to get fired. By that moment, his name was "Bruce"[1].
The animated series portrays Wally as the "shell" of a long gone great programmer. As described by a female employee in a flashback "He just programmed an entire database from scratch!" He is used later in the episode to solve the Y2K bug while hypnotized. When the hypnosis wears off, Wally claims he is more "soiled" than usual and asks if he had been working.
Wally drinks numerous cups of coffee. He does little work and avoids situations in which he has to work. Since he does not feel loyalty to the company, he annoys other people by asking frivolous things during budget requests, disregarding rules, hanging around others' cubicles (especially Alice's), and turning his cubicle into a pool. He has often been criticized for a lack of hygiene, particularly chronic flatulence. In the TV series he constantly needles Alice with sexist jokes, which usually are met with violent retaliation from her.
However, Adams notes that Wally is "effective in his own way." Despite (or perhaps because of) his laziness, he often finds creative means of solving problems, such as getting Alice to bend a metal rod for Dilbert's computer project by telling her it's an award "for being male". Less constructively, he uses his laziness to get others to do his work for him, and has many creative excuses for avoiding work (such as "imagining what it would be like to be a fly").
On a personal level, Wally has been married at least three times; his last wife divorced him because of his long work hours. He appears to have a crush on Tina the Tech Writer (although the feeling is far from mutual), and has dated several times since, even gaining a trophy wife when he became "cool" by growing his hair long and tying it in a ponytail.
Wally is the outcome of thousands of generations of selective breeding, designed to produce no Biometric impression: No pulse, no fingerprints, no DNA.
Wally has a mentor-student relationship with Asok, and once told him that the reason he enjoys talking to him is that he is there.
Occasionally at staff meetings, he gives the PHB the "Wally Report": an over-dramatic, story-like report detailing his weekly "accomplishments" which are always trivial if not nonexistent. Some of these include:
1. Copying 'over 800,000 bits of data to a disaster backup facility'(copying his resume to a diskette)[2]
2. Stating that 'he had so much work, his happiness was in extreme jeopardy. So instead of doing his work, he wrote the Wally Report instead.' [3]
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