A shepherd was herding his flocks in a remote pasture when suddenly a brand-new Jeep Cherokee advanced out of a dust cloud towards him.

The driver, a young man in a Brioni suit, Gucci shoes, Ray Ban sunglasses and leaned out of the window and asked our shepherd, “If I can tell you exactly how many sheep you have in your flock, will you give me one?”

The shepherd looked at the yuppie, then at his peacefully grazing flock and calmly answered, “Sure!”

The yuppie parked the car, whipped out his laptop, connected it to a cell-phone, surfed to a NASA page on the Internet where he called up a GPS satellite navigation system, scanned the area, and opened up a database and some 60 Excel spreadsheets with complex formulas. Finally, he printed out a 150-page report on his hi-tech miniaturized printer, then turned round to our shepherd and said, “You have here exactly 1,586 sheep!”

“That’s right. So as agreed, you can take one of the sheep,” said the shepherd. He watched the young man make a selection and bundle it in his Jeep.

Then the shepherd said, “If I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me my sheep back?”

“Okay, why not!” answered the young man.

“You are a consultant,” said the shepherd.

“This is right! How did you know?”

“Easy. You turned up here although nobody called you.

You want to be paid for finding the answer to a question to which I already knew the answer. And you don’t know boom all about my business, because that’s my dog you just loaded into your Jeep.”

~~~

Deja Moo: The feeling that you’ve heard this bull before.