A shepherd was herding his flock in a remote pasture when suddenly a brand-new BMW appeared in a cloud of dust.

The driver, a young man in a Brioni suit, Gucci shoes, RayBan sunglasses and YSL tie, leaned out the window and asked the shepherd, "If I tell you how many sheep you have, will you give me one?"

The shepherd looked at the yuppie, then at his grazing flock, and calmly answered, "Okay."

The yuppie parked his car, grabbed his handheld GPS, whipped out his Pocket PC, surfed to NASA's web site, entered in the GPS data, brought up a recent ultra-high-resolution satellite photo, transferred it to Photoshop and exported it to an image processing facility in Hamburg.

Within seconds, his Blackberry had an email notifying him that his image was processed and its data stored in a Sesame database on a networked server nearby. He downloaded the data into an ODBC-connected Excel spreadsheet, ran a statistical analysis, transferred the results to Word, outlined it, massaged the outline, then OLEd it into a short PowerPoint presentation, which he then showed to the shepherd.

It read, simply, "1,586."

"That's right. Well, I guess you can have a sheep." The young man selected an animal and loaded it into the BMW's trunk.

The shepherd then asked him, "If I can name your profession, can I have my sheep back?"

The man said, "Okay, sure. Why not?"

Without a moment's hesitation, the shepherd said, "You're a consultant."

"That's right!" said the yuppie, "but how did you know?"

"Easy. You showed up here even though nobody called you; you expected to get paid for an answer I already knew, to a question I never asked; and, you don't know a damned thing about my business.

Now give me back my dog!"