A shepherd was herding his flock at a remote Australian sheep-station when
suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced out of a dust cloud towards him.
The driver, a young man in a Hugo Boss suit, Gucci shoes, Ray Ban sunglasses
and a 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 and says, "Sure. Why not?"
The young guy parks his car, whips out his Dell notebook computer, connects
it to his AT&T cell phone, 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.
He 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 he 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 me back my sheep?"
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...."
" ... and now please give me back my sheep."