Characteristics
Wally is described in the animated series as the "shell of a long gone great programmer". As described by a female employee in a flashback sequence, "He just programmed an entire database from scratch!". He is used later in the same episode to solve the Y2K bug while hypnotized. When the hypnosis wears off, Wally claims he is more "soiled" than usual and asks if he had been working.
Wally described himself in one strip as the outcome of thousands of generations of selective breeding, designed to produce no Biometric impression: No pulse, no fingerprints, no DNA.
He drinks numerous cups of coffee and is almost never seen without a coffee mug. He avoids all situations in which he has to work and when assigned tasks he does everything he can to stall or delay, or pass the work to someone else. Since he does not feel loyalty to the company, he takes pleasure in annoying others by asking frivolous questions during budget requests, disregarding rules, loitering around others' cubicles (especially Alice's), and turning his own cubicle into a swimming pool. He is sometimes criticized for a lack of hygiene, particularly chronic flatulence. In the TV series he constantly needles Alice with sexist jokes, which usually are met with violent retaliation from her.
In spite of Wally's unproductiveness and lack of ethics, Adams notes that Wally is "effective in his own way." In his quest to avoid all work, he often finds creative means of solving problems, such as tricking Alice into bending a metal rod for one of Dilbert's projects by telling her it's an award "for being male." Less constructively, he regularly tricks others into doing his assigned tasks for him, and has many creative excuses for avoiding work (such as "imagining what it would be like to be a fly").
Wally has been married at least three times; his last wife divorced him because of his long work hours. He appears to have a crush on Tina the Tech Writer (although the feeling is not mutual), and he has dated several times. He briefly obtained a trophy wife when he became "cool" by growing his hair long and tying it in a ponytail.
Wally has a mentor-student relationship with Asok, and once told him that the reason he enjoys talking to him is that he is there.
Occasionally at staff meetings, he gives the Pointy Haired Boss the "Wally Report": an over-dramatic, story-like report detailing his weekly "accomplishments" which in reality are always trivial if not nonexistent. Some of these include:
- Copying 'over 800,000 bits of data to a disaster backup facility' (copying his resume to a diskette)
- Stating that 'he had so much work, his happiness was in extreme jeopardy. So instead of doing his work, he wrote the Wally Report instead.'
Wally was fired on one occasion in 2008 for hanging a comic on the wall, but then almost immediately hired back as a contractor at a higher wage because people outside the company appeared smarter to the Pointy Haired Boss and Catbert. He eventually became immune from getting fired, when in 2010 he came into the sole possession of the company's "critical knowledge". This was revealed to him by the company's oldest veteran, "Old Johannsen". The latter died immediately thereafter, leaving Wally as the sole keeper of that "critical knowledge", making him irreplaceable.
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