Dairy farmer

[dida]

A dairy farmer was herding his cows in a remote pasture when suddenly
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 farmer;

"If I tell you exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd, will

you give me a calf?"



The farmer looks at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looks at his

peacefully grazing herd 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, and 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.



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 farmer and says;

"You have exactly 1586 cows and calves."



"That's right. Well, I guess you can take one of my calves," says the

farmer.

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 farmer says to the young man;

"Hey, if I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back

my calf?"



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



"You're a consultant" says the farmer.



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



"No guessing required." answered the farmer.

"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 anything about my business........

Now give me back my dog."

[nissanneill]

Yeh, I like it.
It is certainly reminiscent of the yuppy set who think they know it all but know very little when compared to a well experienced down to earth person.

Neill

[RTflorida]

Switch the BMW for a company supplied Ford Explorer and you have a story about my boss. Has all the gadgets, all of the data, thinks he has all of the answers (which I provided), but no idea how to use it all to grow our business.

RT