A shepherd was herding his flock in a remote pasture when suddenly a
brand new BMW 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 young man 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. 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-color, 150-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturized HP
LaserJet printer and finally turns to the shepherd and says, "You
have exactly 1,586 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 him back to me?"

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 young man, "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."


Johnny B. (the other one) ®
Butler's Rest Home - "No Vacancy"

"I say strap him into a wheelchair and give him a burial at sea!"
- CNN's Jack Cafferty on Yasser Arafat

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