HOW MANY COWS?

A cowboy was herding his cattle in a remote pasture when suddenly, a 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 of the window and asks the cowboy, “If I tell you exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd, will you give me a calf?”

The cowboy looks at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looks at his peaceful grazing herd and calmly answers, “Sure, why not?”

The young man parks his car, whips out his iPad, connects it to his iPhone, and surfs to a Google 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 Google satellite that scans the area in an ultrahigh 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 that the image has been processed and the data stored.

He then accesses an MS-SQL database with hundreds of complex formulas through an ODBC-connected Excel spreadsheet. He uploads all of this data via an email on his iPad 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 cowboy and says, “You have exactly 1586 cows and calves.”

“That’s right. Well, I guess you can take one of my calves,” says the cowboy.

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 cowboy 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 cowboy.

“Wow! That’s correct,” says the young man, “how did you guess that?”

“No guessing required,” answered the cowboy. “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!”