He is hopelessly incompetent at management, and often tries to compensate for his lack of skills with countless group therapy sessions and business strategies that usually never bear fruit.
His brother is a demon named "Phil, the Prince of Insufficient Light", and according to Adams, the pointy hair is intended to remind one of devil's horns.
Like the Pointy-Haired Boss, Wally is utterly lacking in ethics and will take advantage of any situation to maximize his personal gain while doing the least possible amount of honest work.
This had the effect of causing this man—whom Adams describes as "one of the more brilliant people I've met"—to work hard at being incompetent, rude, and generally poor at his job to qualify for the buy-out program.
She believes it is because she is female, though in reality it is likely because she has a quick, often violent temper, sometimes putting her lethal "Fist of Death" to use, even with the Pointy-Haired Boss.
Yet despite his intelligence, ethics and mystical powers, Asok sometimes takes advice from Wally in the arts of laziness, and from Dilbert in surviving the office.
As of February 7, 2014, Asok is officially gay, which never impacts any storylines but merely commemorates a decision by the Indian Supreme Court to uphold an anti-gay law.
Another coworker who became a regular character in the TV series, despite appearing in just a few comic strips on April 21, 1995 and March 17, 2006, and again by popular request on October 11, 2006.
Loud Howard is incapable of speaking quietly, and in the TV series his overpowering voice often breaks anything and everything around him, including people's eardrums.
It has also shattered glass, caused his fillings to vibrate so hard they fall out of his teeth, slammed people against the wall and rendered his sneezes powerful enough to strip a person's flesh from their bones.
Howard as a recurring character is better-suited to the animated series, where his voice actor, Jim Wise, can speak as loudly as necessary.
She has, for example: encouraged him to buy a build-it-yourself helicopter kit; scheduled his business trips via third world countries experiencing rebel insurrections; caused him to crash his car by sending him texts marked 'crisis' so that he will answer them while driving; scheduled 'walking meetings' so that his lack of physical coordination may cause self-injury, for example by falling off a bridge, and holding a press conference stating that her boss is an infamous serial killer.
He was not originally intended to be a regular, instead being part of a series of strips featuring a lab scientist's cruel experiments (Ratbert's name at this stage was XP-39C²).
Ratbert soon realized that he was the subject of a hideous macaroni and cheese experiment (the scientist made him eat huge amounts of it and writes in his notebook that it causes paranoia in rats[7]) and escaped, eventually finding a refuge in Dilbert's house.
Like Dogbert, he has made inroads into business, once working as an intern, a concierge, a consultant (with an "external brain-pack" tied to his torso, which was actually a slab of liver[10]) and vice-president of marketing (for which he was hired on the basis of his week in a dumpster at Procter & Gamble).
An unnamed cat appeared in two 1992 strips as the companion of Dilbert's "perfect romantic match"; he or she strongly resembled the later Catbert design.
The real Catbert, unnamed, first appeared in a series of comic strips from September 12 to 16, 1994, when he attacked Ratbert and rebooted Dilbert's computer before Dogbert finally kicked him out of the house.
Reader response asked for "more Catbert," despite the cat never having been named, and Adams decided to bring him back as the "evil director" of human resources.
Some of his own strategies have been known to backfire on him, like the August 2007 strips where he made the employees wear brain monitoring helmets when he suspected they were thinking about pleasant stuff rather than work.
Wally, naturally, was the first whose helmet went off, and when Catbert went over what he was thinking about he went metaphorically "blind",[29] possibly with the same reaction the Pointy-haired boss afterwards had: "I was happier not knowing.
Her husband has been missing for years, at a 24-hour "All-You-Can-Eat" restaurant in the local mall (he will not leave until it is all he can eat); in the animated series, she was touched by a surveillance video of him, given to her by Dilbert and Dogbert.
As Dogbert shows, their brains are so hard-wired that seeing someone wearing a baseball cap backwards causes their heads to explode (which he called "paradigm shifting without a clutch").
There have however been cases — for instance, when he made obscure changes to the network without testing just before allegedly leaving for a three-week vacation on a Russian submarine above the Arctic Circle — when his actions could only be explained by malice.
His motives are unclear, although his demeanor suggests he simply takes pleasure using his management and technical powers to make the users of "his" systems suffer.
Whenever anyone mentions in Topper's earshot any difficult task he or she accomplished, he barges into the conversation with a smug facial expression, exclaiming, "That's nothing!"
He then proceeds to top the other's statement with his own, obviously implausible or downright ridiculous, claim (e.g. insulating his house with cheese, implanting himself with insect organs so he can spin silk, or passing a gallstone so big it became the Secretary of Labor in Clinton's administration).
An unseen character in the comic strip, although he does appear in the animated series, in which his face is hidden in a fashion similar to some of the humans from "Tom and Jerry" or Wilson from "Home Improvement".
Adams admitted in Seven Years of Highly Defective People that "Liz never really clicked with me", and eventually had her break up with Dilbert, after she started dating other men.
An old-style computing guy who likes to reminisce about the old days, he's a UNIX user and software architect to whom both Wally and Alice have taken exception.
He is widely rumored to be based on computer scientist and cryptographer Igor Faynberg (a Bell Labs Fellow), who admits that this may be the case, but has no memory of having met Adams.