A shepherd was herding his flock in a remote NZ
pasture when suddenly a brand-new BMW 535i
advanced out of a dust cloud towards him.
The driver, a young man in an Armani suit, Gucci
shoes, Ray Ban sunglasses and YSL tie, leans out the
window and asks the shepherd, "If I tell you exactly
how many sheep you have in your flock, will you give
me one?"
The shepherd looks at the man, obviously a yuppie,
then looks at his peacefully grazing flock and calmly
answers, "Sure, Why not?"
The yuppie parks his car, whips out his Lenovo
notebook computer, connects it to his Telstra mobile
phone. He surfs to a NASA page on the internet,
where he calls up a GPS satellite navigation
system to get an exact fix on his location which he
then feeds to another NASA satellite that scans
the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo. The
young man then opens the digital photo in Adobe
Photoshop and exports it to an image processing
facility in Hamburg , Germany .
Within seconds, he receives an email on his Palm
Pilot that the image has been processed and the data
stored. He then accesses a MS-SQL database
through an ODBC connected Excel spreadsheet with
hundreds of complex formulas. He uploads all of this
data via an email on his Blackberry and,
after a few minutes, receives a response.
Finally, he prints out a full-colour, 150-page
report on his hi-tech, miniaturized HP LaserJet
printer and finally turns to the shepherd and
says, "You have exactly 1586 sheep."
"That's right. Well, I guess you can take one of
my sheep." says the shepherd.
He watches the young man select one of the
animals and looks on amused as the young man stuffs
it into the trunk of his car. Then the shepherd says
to the young man, "Hey, if I can tell you exactly what
your business is, will you give back my animal?"
The young man thinks about it for a second and
then says, "Okay, why not?"
"You're a consultant." says the shepherd.
"Wow! That's correct," says the yuppie, "but how
did you guess that?"
"No guessing required." answered the shepherd.
"You showed up here even though nobody called
you; you want to get paid for an answer I already
knew; to a question I never asked; and you don't
know crap about my business.
Now give me back my dog!!!
