An old shepherd named Albert was overseeing his herd in a remote pasture in the countryside when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced out of the drizzle towards him.

The driver, a young man in a Brioni suit, Gucci shoes, RayBan 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 a lamb?’

Albert looks at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looks at his peacefully grazing flock and calmly answers, ‘Ok, Why not?’

The yuppie parks his car, whips out his Dell notebook computer, connects it to his new ‘Windows’ mobile phone, and surfs to a NASA page on the Internet, where he calls up a GPS satellite 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 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 and lambs.’

‘That’s right. Well, I guess you can take one of my lambs,’ says Albert.

He watches the young man select one of the animals & looks on amused as the young man stuffs it into the trunk of his car.

Then Albert says to the young man, ‘Hey, if I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my animal?’

The young man thinks about it for a second and then says, ‘Okay, why not?’

‘You’re a Management Consultant’, says Albert.

‘Wow! That’s correct,’ says the yuppie, ‘but how did you guess that?’

‘No guessing required.’ answered the old 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. 

You used god knows how much technology to show me how much smarter than me you are; and you still don’t know a thing about sheep.

Now give me back my dog.’