How about....
...Barbie the witch instead.
We take all the Barbies and burn then, oh and the Bratz things as well...
Our friends at insideHPC pushed this story recently, but there hasn’t been an accompanying groundswell of buzz, so I’m bringing it to The Register’s audience in an attempt to get the ball rolling. Mattel, purveyor of the iconic Barbie doll, is running a contest to decide Barbie’s next career. She has quite a wide range of …
...such as desktop or network support/admin, she would undoubtedly need:
Shabby clothes - you aren't going to crawl under desks and into risers in a nice dress.
Multitool - Leatherman-esque knife/pliers combo for cutting through cabling rats nests.
A utilitarian handbag with a cheap mobile phone, make up compact, can of deoderant and a pack fo alka-seltzer, for when [and the morning after] comprehensively outdrinking the men in the team. Which seems to be a common theme with the lasses I have worked with.
Also, a box full of motherboards, hard drives, SCSI cards and GPUs, for her houseshare in south London where she annoys her flatmates by trying to get esoteric old hardware to work properly.
And a large stock of absinthe.
There again, mebbe that's just the lasses I have worked with. And loved working with, frankly.
Anon though, as I don't want a slap from them - as despite all the above, they are still nice fluffy girls at heart.
"such as desktop or network support/admin, "
That would make her a technician, not an engineer.
The engineer is the person who designed the system in such a way that the technician needs 6 different Torx screwdrivers and a non-standard wrench in order to change the hard drive.
Hmm, nearly typed non-standartd /wench/ there. That would be Barbie...
...used to run-the-bitches-over with me Tonka trucks! Wa-ha-haha! Think I also got Ken to be their pimp once too, oh how we laughed!
Back on topic, Well seeing as Barbie is all like fashionable and stuff, they'd probably give her a magic pink iPad rather then anything that's any use for her job.
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They could have made a small fortune selling lenses, upgrading the bodies every year ... They could have done a Nikon and asked $8,000 for a new model. For those who like the retro feel, they could have sold, darkroom Barbie, complete with chemical stains on her hands and an instant response of hands flying to her face when coming out in to the sunlight.
... or are they too scared that the combination of Barbie, Ken and the little red light might be a little too much for young minds?
I don't think she'd need many accessories really, after all she'd be promoted to PM pretty damned quick and just have to tell us engineers what we should be doing on a daily basis instead.
I think she needs a diploma from some crappy management school, a copy of the contractual SLA's and budgetary control. Possibly a copy of "PCs for Dummies" so she can understand all the technical language that real engineers sling around?
Oh yeah, perhaps some carpet burns from the promotional process too.
She can have a whole wardrobe full of heavy metal / geek / just plain rude Tee shirts, mountain boots, thirty or forty pairs of jeans (of which she only wears her 'favourite' pair), oh and a single dress for when she visits her Mum.
Her dressing table can be fitted out with sample beers from all over the world, and single speed CD drives and 32MB HDDs, various Linux distro CDs, three boxes of A4 micro-perf fan fold printer paper, 170 to 200 kilos of various technical manuals for such exciting things as Apollo Domain Unix installation complete with 57 5 1/4 inch floppy disks, Borland C (Brand New, Try it today!!!) George, The Operating System. A single lipstick (the one she bought the day after she left school) currently lying under one of the boxes of fan fold paper.
She can have an anorak for the winter and a thick leather coat for the summer.
See so much and I haven't even started on her real home (her cubical) yet.
Ken should be her manager, with pointy hair. She hates him.
If you drop out the girly stuff, it's disturbingly like my dressing table. Fan-fold, check. HDDs are 40/60Mb. CDs, iomegas, blah blah. Linux distro? Minix3-yeah! TurboPascal 5.5 full set (well, hey, a quid from a charity shop!). You forgot the 386 motherboards, four different types of memory (remember the old 30-pin SIMMs?) and various bits that once belonged inside a BBC Micro...
Seriously, Best idea ever! Accessories should include, little tins of cat food, soiled baggy clothing, over-flowing litter trays and as a special bonus, Ken in a new role as "Community psychiatric nurse" to check on Barbie to make sure shes not laying dead on the kitchen floor, surrounded by very hungry cats.
I voted computer engineer, but I only voted at all because I know that if it comes out, Moss and Roy will get their hands on one. I have no idea what they'll do with it, but it ought to be hilarious.
In fact, it probably doesn't matter -- now that the suggestion's out there, it'll probably find its way into the series whether or not it actually exists.
(Almost) every "Computer Engineer Barbie" will either very quickly move to another department (IT management or something "audity") or leave and start having babies, then be too far "out of it" to return when the short ones are big enough to be left alone so they'll go into teaching or something else instead.
Sigh... whatever she wears she'll need to have a change of clothes, IT is rarely a career.