Headcount

A farmer named Sid was overseeing his stock in a  remote moorland pasture in  North Yorkshire when suddenly a  brand-new BMW advanced toward him out of 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 farmer, “If I tell  you exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd, Will you give me a  calf?”  
                
Sid looks at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looks at his  peacefully grazing stock and calmly answers, “Sure, why not?” 
 
The yuppie parks his car, whips out his Dell notebook computer,  connects it to his Cingular RAZR V3 cell 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 an 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, turns to the farmer and says, “You  have exactly 1,586 cows and calves.”         
                  
“That’s right. Well, I  guess you can take one of my calves,” says Sid. 
         
He watches the young man select one of the animals and looks on  with amusement as the young man stuffs it into the back of his car. 
               
Then Sid 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 Management Consultant”, says Sid. 
        
“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.  You used millions of pounds worth of equipment trying to show me how much  smarter than me you are; and you don’t know a thing about how working people  make a living – or about cows, for that matter.  This is a herd of sheep.  …

          
Now give me back my dog!