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 a Broni 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 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. Within seconds, he
receives an email on his Palm Pilot
that the image has been processed and the data stored. He then accesses an MS-SQL database through an
ODBC connected Excel spreadsheet with hundreds of complex formulae. 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, miniaturised
HP LaserJet printer. He then turns to the shepherd and says, "You have
exactly 1,586 sheep." "That's right. Well, I suppose 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 boot of his car. Then the shepherd says to the young man, "Now 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?" "I didn't need to guess," 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 know nothing about my business . . . . . Now give me back my
dog." |