A cowboy was herding his cattle 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, Ray
Ban sunglasses YSL tie, leans out the window and asks the
cowboy, "If I tell you exactly how many cows and calves
you have in your herd, will you give me a calf?"
The cowboy looks at the man, obviously a yuppie, then
looks at his peacefully grazing herd 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, 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 formula. 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 cowboy and says,
"You have exactly 1586 cows and calves."
"That's right. Well, I guess you can take one of
my calves," says the cowboy. 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 cowboy says to the young man, "Hey,
if I can tell you exactly what your business is,
will you give me back my calf?"
The young man thinks about it for a second and
then says, "Okay, why not?" "
"You're a consultant" says the cowboy.
"Wow! That's correct," says the yuppie, "but
how did you guess that?"
"No guessing required." answered the cowboy.
"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 anything about my business...
Now give me back my dog.