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One for the IT guys
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 then looks at his
peacefully grazing flock and calmly answers, "Sure. Why not?"
The yuppie parks his car, whips out his Dell notebook computer, connects
it to his AT&T cell phone, and 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 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
a hoot about my business ... now, give me back my dog!"
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