The Shepherd and the Consultant

[buffettbride]

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 very expensive suit, shoes, sunglasses, and 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, then looks at his peacefully grazing flock and calmly answers "Sure. Why not?"The man parks his car, whips out his laptop, connects it to his 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. Then the young man opens the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop and exports it to an image processing facility in Hamburg.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 1586 sheep."

That's right. Well, I guess you can take one of my sheep." says the shepherd. He watches amused as the young man stuffs one of the animals 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, can I get that back?" The young man thinks about it for a second and then says, "Okay, why not?"

You're a consultant." says the shepherd.

That's correct," says the man, "but how did you guess that?"

No guess work," answered the shepherd. "You show 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 squat about sheep.

Now give me back my dog."

[Ilph]