A shepherd was tending his flock in a remote pasture when suddenly a brand-new Jeep Cherokee appeared out of a dust cloud, advanced toward him and stopped. The driver, a 20 something fellow wearing a Brioni suit, Gucci shoes, Ray Ban sunglasses and a YSL tie, leaned out of the window and asked the 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 young guy, then at his peacefully grazing flock, and calmly answered, "Sure."

The young man parked his car, whipped out his notebook computer, 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, then opened up a database and some Excel spreadsheets with complex formulas.

He finally printed out a 150-page report on his hi-tech miniaturized printer, turned around to our shepherd and said, "You have here exactly 1,586 sheep!"

"Amazing! That's correct! Like I agreed, you can take one of my sheep," said the shepherd.

The shepherd watched the man make a selection and bundle it into his Cherokee. When he was finished the sheepherder said, "If I can tell you exactly what your political persuasion is, where you're from and who you work for, will you give me my sheep back?"

"Okay, why not," answered the young man.

"You're a Republican/Democrat from (name your city here) and you're working for (name here a local politician or your mayor)," said the shepherd.

"Wow! That's correct," said the young man. "How did you ever guess that?

"Easy," answered the shepherd. "Nobody called you, but you showed up here anyway. You want to be paid for providing a solution to a question I already knew the answer to. And you clearly don't know squat about what you're doing. Now ... can I have my dog back?"