Car Boot Barbie

Last week Stace mentioned in a post about receiving her first doll at Christmas. I was so intrigued by the idea that I immediately popped onto that old faithful Amazon to see if they had any in stock and lo and behold they did.
Well being a software engineer myself I couldn't resist and ordered one. Amazingly despite the New Year it turned up on Wednesday.
Thursday morning the new recruit at our company went into work and sat at my desk. Well OK sat on my desk.
V, my boss, loved it when she saw it and promptly emailed her partner to say she wanted one. Not sure that she's going to get one.
The guys I work with also loved it. Their all geeks to some level and soon playing spot the computer references with the box. There are some brilliant ones, the Linux penguin sitting on the bookshelf, the binary representation for the ASCII codes for the letters in Barbie on the monitor. All brilliant! Whoever came up with the concept for the packaging really knew what they were doing.

Barbie on the parcel shelf of the car at work (can't take pictures in the office unfortunately)

That afternoon I was chatting with the guy that sits next to me and he said that he thought it was a really good idea having versions of Barbie that get away from stereotypical female activities. Engineering is such a male dominated industry that anything that encourages young girls to look at careers that they might not normally thing about has to be worthwhile.

When I was younger I used to have Action Man figures as well as Lone Ranger and Tonto figures, the latter used to be part of my Saturday morning television figures when they showed reruns of the series.



My sister used to have Sindy dolls and on one occasion when she wasn't around Sindy decided that she was going to take a short holiday and wandered into my bedroom where she decided to have fun with the boys. Unfortunately for Tonto he was the one that she picked on.

Well, I was just starting to deal with my own gender at the time and so poor Tonto ended up in one of Sindy's dresses. I'm not sure whether he enjoyed it but with his long hair he could be a girl a lot better that the Lone Ranger or Action Man, besides Action Man would never fit into one of Sindy's outfits.

At the time I was also just experimenting with trying on my Mum's things when I had the house to myself but this wasn't often. Sneaking one of Sindy's outfits and putting Tonto into it was something that was a lot easier to do and could be hidden away in a hurry if I was disturbed.

Finally though I have my very on Barbie, she wont get played with but kept just in case at some point in the future (like the Aliens Ellen Ripley figure I bought in Forbidden Planet 20 years ago, Lady Penelope's Fab 1 car, and the Stingray model that I've bought more recently) they are worth something as a collectors item. The others are on top of wardrobes or in a cupboard but Barbie is going to go on top of the unit in our living room along with the hoard of Discworld figures that are currently sitting there.

Big thanks to Stace for posting about Barbie I Can Be a Computer Engineer.