Quality, Opacity, and the Wiseass Business Model

Hi. I'm a wiseass. A "repeat business" wiseass. I know this because a CIO told me. "Do you get any repeat business, being such a wiseass?" he asked me during the Q&A portion of my presentation to a group of a couple of dozen CIOs.

Normally at these sorts of events protocol dictates that I have a sales department chaperone present at all times to make sure I use the correct fork for the shrimp cocktail, etc, and this was no exception.

My technical colleague and I riffed away, deftly interspersing witty-yet-topical infosec anecdotes with sales patter and doomsaying while we charmed the gathered CIOs with our analysis of the threat insiders posed to their organisations.

Now, you and I know that any sort of insider access is game-fuckin-over, but for the purposes of making the presentation more sales-friendly than a singe powerpoint slide saying, "you're all fucked, plz give us some money while you're still in business," we humoured them.

As I drew to a close, I looked around the audience, fruit platters on the table, a few shunned greasy pastries (they did have bacon, at least) and stewed coffee. I went for my concluding slide -- the last bit of useful information to be shared with the room before the sales drones would activate and attack.

When my sales-chaperone guy saw it he started twitching up the back -- it was off topic and he knows how I roll.