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...
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 Brioni suit, Gucci shoes,
Oliver Peoples 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 Apple notebook computer, connects it to his Verizon iPhone, 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 iPhone 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
iPhone 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 the young man
selects one of the animals stuffs it into the trunk of his car.
“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.”