Since I am not at liberty to discuss what I've been doing for the last two weeks and why that makes this assertion completely, utterly and shamefully naive (and

Since I am not at liberty to discuss what I've been doing for the last two weeks and why that makes this assertion completely, utterly and shamefully naive (and ridiculous), I'm just going to tell you a story. Years ago, my mother worked for a company that did installations and technical support for PoS appliances. She was employee number four. This company figured that since it was chock full of highly technical people, they had no real need for an established IT department or any sort of formal policy for servers or services on site. Guess what the password to their payroll server was? Despite having grown from a small start-up to a respectably financially successful company in less than a decade (note: BEFORE the dot.com bubble, mind you), once their staff of technical people found out that some techs were being paid more than others... well, you can imagine what happened. My mother was one of the last people out the door. Every time I read or hear someone shrug off the importance of IT, complain about policies or refer to IT staff as a 'cost center', I am reminded of how 'mainstream' staff still have a lot of trouble wrapping their minds around how much trouble one badly behaved employee can cause. Even when there is an established IT department, it usually suffers from such a paucity of resources and effective management that the enterprise network... well, the word 'bloodbath' comes to mind. And now I'm going to start a stopwatch to see how much time elapses before tptacek makes me delete this comment. :-)