Paul Brock:  

After being plucked from my happy, comfortable, and (as I had it figured) well-planned future in Oscoda, MI in 1980, my family moved to Marshall, TX for my senior year in high school. While I didn't understand my parents' reasons for at least the timing of that move at first, I'm starting to come around after almost 30 years. At the very least, that's why there are two high schools in my profile. I graduated from high school in Texas and set about squeezing four years of college into eight (thanks for that creative description go to Christian entertainer Mark Lowry). That's why there are two colleges in my profile. I started out as a commuting student at Kilgore College for about 2 1/2 years, then transferred to The University of Texas at Austin for years of subsequent abuse on my self-esteem and GPA. That's probably not a completely fair reflection on my UT years, as I worked full-time throughout college, but I still like to hold a little of the bitterness in reserve for emergencies like this. I graduated in 1989 with a BBA in Accounting, but I had already been working for EDS for a little over a year by then. And I have NEVER been an Accountant. I spent the first six years of my professional career as a proposal writer for EDS, after dabbling in radio and the music business during college. I thought I had abandoned the writing gig to become a consultant, but it turns out consultants tend to write (and speak) a lot--so, I'm still using my high school typing skills and Mr. Gum's speech coaching all the time. I jumped around from company to company a bit during the 90s (IBM, Tandem/Compaq, and Silicon Graphics) with a bunch of folks who built up professional services teams, and settled at a payment management company called CyberSource (CYBS if you're ever on NASDAQ Jeopardy) in April, 2000. I'm still there today (notwithstanding a little "vacation" I took from 2002-2004-- but that is a very long story), and I like to call what I do "fighting bad guys." What that means is that I promote, market, and sell the services of a group of people that help companies who sell things on the Internet to avoid credit card fraud. We don't track down the criminals and shoot up their hideouts or anything, instead, we tell the merchants to reject their transactions, so that they just don't have to deal with the crooks in the first place. I just think "fighting bad guys" sounds more interesting. I met the girl I married at work. We both worked for two different parts of EDS, and although we didn't know each other or work together on anything, we both asked friends of ours to introduce us. We only knew each other for a few mont...Expand for more