Consultants and Sheep

Here's a funny story about some of the people we deal with at work. Very smart and well paid people, but sometimes, you have to question them.

A norwegian farmer is herding his gigantic herd of sheep when a tough new BMW 5 series pull up on the road next to his field. A young guy in a Broni dress with Gucci shoes, RayBans and a YSL tie sticks his head out the window and shouts to the farmer: 'If I can tell you exactly how many sheep you have, will you give me one of them?'
The farmer looks at the kid and says: Well, thats OK with me'. The guy pulls over to the side, opens his notebook on the hood, hooks it up to the latest Nokia cell phone, and surfs to a NASA site, and calls up a GPS sattelite navigation system, picks up their exact position, and feeds it to another NASA sattelite the takes an ultra high resolution photo of the field. Then he opens the digital image in Photoshop and exports it to another site: 'Image processing facility in Hamburg, Germany' . Within seconds he receives an e-mail on his palm pilot that reads 'picture processed and data stored. Then he logs in to an SQL database via ODBC and calls up an Excel sheet with hundres of built in formulas. Then he loads all the data to a Xircom and in an instant he receives an answer. Lastly he prints out a multicolor, 150 page report on his high tech mini HP color laserjet and glances at the last page:

'You have exactly 1586 animals' he says.

The farmer says its correct, so its ok that you take a sheep. Then he is watching while the kid picks an animal, and struggles to fit it in the trunk of the BMW. Finally he says: 'Hey you - if I can tell you what your job is, can I then have my sheep back?' The young guy thinks for a second and then says: 'Yeah, why not?'. The farmer says: 'you are a consultant'. 'Oh, my God, you are right', the guys says - 'how could you guess?' - 'I am not guessing' the farmer says 'You came here without me calling you, then you wanted me to pay you for an answer I already knew, even to a question I never asked - furthermore you have absolutely NO clue about my business! - So would you please open the trunk and give me my DOG back?'