Sunday Funnies – Problem With Authority

I was meeting with a new client, and he shared this Dilbert cartoon.

This lead us into origin stories for our respective businesses.

When I was working at US West in the late 90’s, I used to fantasize with my friends at work about starting my own business, “WeissCo Worldwide.”

One day I was receiving “correction” from my supervisor about some subset of the company rules that I was not complying with.  The discussion continued to the point where he became upset with my nimble parrying and countering his arguments, and in exasperation said to me, “Weiss do you always have to be such a smart ass?”  My reply was, “well it certainly beats being a dumb ass.”

I eventually lost my job during the Internet Recession of 2000 to 2002.  So of course I started that business.  When it came time for me to pick a domain name for my new enterprise, all the good domain names I tried that contained my last name, WEISS, were gone.  So I tried some creative mis-spellings which is where the WYZ came from.  The GUYS part I owe to my supervisor at US West.  Smartass Computers was not going to work, but WyzGuys Computer and Network support did.  WyzGuys.com and later the corporate entity, the WyzCo Group Inc, fulfilled that early dream.

As it turns out, I really do have a problem with authority.  So much of the “authority” I have come across was really underserved.  Generally, if other people’s rules make no sense to me, I choose to make my own rules.

So that’s the origin story for WyzGuys.com

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About the Author:

I am a cybersecurity and IT instructor, cybersecurity analyst, pen-tester, trainer, and speaker. I am an owner of the WyzCo Group Inc. In addition to consulting on security products and services, I also conduct security audits, compliance audits, vulnerability assessments and penetration tests. I also teach Cybersecurity Awareness Training classes. I work as an information technology and cybersecurity instructor for several training and certification organizations. I have worked in corporate, military, government, and workforce development training environments I am a frequent speaker at professional conferences such as the Minnesota Bloggers Conference, Secure360 Security Conference in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, the (ISC)2 World Congress 2016, and the ISSA International Conference 2017, and many local community organizations, including Chambers of Commerce, SCORE, and several school districts. I have been blogging on cybersecurity since 2006 at http://wyzguyscybersecurity.com

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