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, 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. Then the young man 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 1586 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 crap about my business. Now 
give me back my dog."