Patty

Vital Statistics

First Appearance: Take this Job and rm -f it (August 26, 2004)

Full Name: Patricia Johnson

Known Aliases: Patty, "P.J."

Status: Alive

Species: Human

Gender: Female

Height: 5' (152.4 cm)

Weight: 110 lb (49.90 kg)

Hair: "Dirty" blond

Distinguishing Characteristics: Glasses, freckles

Marital Status: Single

Character Description

Patty is an employee of GPF Software. She first encountered Fooker when they both worked as contractors at Regional Telecom. Dwayne brought in Patty as a contractor during an expansion of new work and she eventually became a full-time employee of GPF Software. She now serves as one of the company's junior developers.

It was at Regional Telecom that Patty rather accidentally became entangled with the elite secret society of hackers known as the Brotherhood of the Twisted Pair. Unceremoniously drafted against her will by Scott, she now seems to get unwittingly caught up in whatever bizarre Brotherhood business he and Tim initiate, including their search for "the One", the fabled geek Messiah who will lead all of geekdom into a future age of technological enlightenment.

Patty is very gruff and rough around the edges, tending to let sarcasm be her answer for just about everything. It turns out that this abrasive personality is a defense mechanism against intimacy, as she prefers not to get very close to anyone. This probably stems from an incident where she sabotaged her own wedding, jilting her groom into leaving her at the altar. She now steers well clear of any sort of romantic attachments as well as most other personal relationships, although Dexter could end up being the one to thaw her icy exterior.

Patty has come to develop a "frenemy" relationship with Trish, which was compounded by the fact that Patty encountered "Bad Trish" from the Negaverse first. The two first met when "Bad Trish" crashed Patty's blind date with Dexter. "Bad Trish's" aggressiveness immediately put Patty on edge, and the two feuded for Dexter's attention the entire evening. At Nick and Ki's wedding rehearsal dinner, Patty quickly became suspicious of Trish's "schizophrenia" while most of the others had come to accept it as fact. When Trish vanished (recalled back to the Negaverse by Emperor Nicholas the Puissant), Patty was drafted to become one of Ki's bridesmaids since Lori was unavailable. Years later, when "Good Trish" came to work at GPF, she and Patty bumped into each other. Unaware that the two "Trishes" were different individuals from alternate universes, Patty was instantly hostile toward her. This friction remained until Dwayne forced them to work on a project together. Trish eventually managed to convince Patty she had no prior memory of her, which Patty took as amnesia from Trish's long hospital stay. The two eventually became semi-friendly acquaintances, even attending a Renaissance fair together.

Patty played a minor but important part during Scylla and Charybdis. She agreed to accompany Fred and Dexter as the trio went to confront Fred's long-time "stalker", Socrates, with Trish and later Persephone in tow. They quickly discovered that Socrates was a "slime mold" like Fred, and that the two were actually aliens. After Socrates revealed Fred's origins and how the pair came to Earth, the group was knocked unconscious and taken aboard one of the alien vessels. It was there they encountered Colonel Lionel Barker, who revealed his convoluted plan to "protect" Earth from alien invasion by helping the aliens take over the planet. Trapped with no means of escape, the group eventually made contact with their friends aboard one of the Grey ships and relayed what they knew of the conflict. After the standoff dissolved with Nick "destroying" the Earth, Patty literally knocked some sense into Nick, getting him out of his self-loathing and back on track. With the rest of the human "survivors", Patty is now helping to search for the missing Earth so it can be returned to its home universe.

In Sharon's dream world of Harry Barker, Patty appears to fill the role of Minerva McGonagall from Harry Potter. She is a teacher at Hollerith's School of Phreaking and Hacking and is the head of the Torvalds Subnet. In the dream, her last name is "McDongle", a mesh of the McGonagall character from Potter and the fact that Sharon didn't know Patty's real last name.

Selected Milestones

Relationships

Mark Morrison, ex-fiancé

Group Affiliations

GPF Software: Developer
Brotherhood of the Twisted Pair: Reluctantly "drafted" by Scott

Miscellaneous Notes

Some Faulties repeatedly confuse Patty for Maddie O'Hara and vice versa. This is probably due to their similar appearances; they are both shorter females with brownish ponytails and round glasses. Even their names are somewhat similar. This is compounded by the fact that the two are very rarely seen in the same scene together; to date, this has only occurred once, at Nick and Ki's wedding. Their noses are the best way to tell them apart; Maddie's is triangular and pointed, while Patty's is round. Maddie's hair is brown while Patty's is "dirty blonde", although both appear as a light gray in gray scale strips. Maddie has a number of loose locks of hair that typically hang down from her temples, while Patty does not. Patty also typically has a few loose bangs that stick out over her forehead. Patty also has very small freckles on her cheeks where Maddie does not. Jeff once posted this sketch to social media to try and help sort out the confusion.