Cowboy Logic

My mother-in-law shared this funny story with me:

A cowboy was herding his herd 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 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 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, 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 Exce spreadsheet with hundreds of complex formulas. He uploads all of this data via an 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 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 yuppie, "but 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."

I find this extra-amusing since my brother is interviewing with management consulting firms right now.  Good luck, brother!  Perhaps your first case assignment will be on a cattle ranch.  =)