Who They Are: Hustlers and Sharks are the high-paid muscle brought in "to show 'em how the Big Boys do it". While some call themselves "management consultants", they are most frequently referred to as "consultants". In either case, the modus operandi is the same -- to make as much money as possible by delaying projects for as long as possible. Hustlers, being the common type, are employed by the IT arm of Big 5 firms and smaller boutiques that specialize in upselling solutions (confusions?) to cash-rich, technologically-challenged sectors such as Financial Services and Healthcare. Sharks, being the less common and more ruthless species, are Hustlers who after years of only receiving only a percentage of the take, have gone out on their own to get all of it, including what they owe the government in taxes. Operating with very low overhead and morals to match, Sharks will say anything and do anything that will assure the green keeps flowing into their Bahamanian bank accounts ("You want a Web site? No problem. I'm the best there is. But bear in mind that in order to do it right, we have to create an object-oriented database that will take at least 23 months to build and debug.").

Where They Can Be Found: A laptop permanently in tow, Hustlers and Sharks are very mobile creatures. They are found, by turns, going door-to-door peddling their goods to the highest bidder, or if currently under contract, lurking under desks in sparse cubes plotting their next scam to get themselves extended and their fees increased.

Average Billed Hours Per Week: 92 (including time spent at home sleeping and meeting with other clients).

Average Actual Hours Worked Per Week: 0 (not including bad-mouthing, undermining and hopefully eliminating in-house NetSlaves).

Average Age: 35 (in "Dick Clark Time")

Average Salary: 125K

Marital Status: Unknown. NOTE: It's not that the information isn't available; rather, it's that Hustlers and Sharks are so busy traveling and confusing people with white-board data flows (card tricks?) that they themselves have forgotten.

Favorite Off-Line Activities: Pretending to know the difference between a nasty-ass, overpriced cigar made in Cuba and other made in the Dominican Republic; bitching about their stock portfolio, bragging about their "great time out on the links last Saturday" with fellow Hustlers and Sharks, too stupid to realize that golf is really the rich guy and rich-guy wannabe equivalent of bowling.

Number of Jobs Held in the Past Three Years: 3 (All at once, for the entire period ... and counting.).

Mode of Dress: Tan Dockers, penny loafers, sky-blue dress shirt, argyle socks. NOTE: Hustlers and Sharks have no time to think about what to wear in the morning and therefore their entire wardrobe consists solely of the aforementioned.

Current Technical Fetishes: Because it is the stock in trade of Hustlers and Sharks to appear to be on the cutting-edge of technology, they are the "early adopter's" early adopter. They own everything from wireless modems to global satellite phones to upwards of 12 PDA's, which they flash whenever possible.

Education: Hustlers and Sharks are fiercely independent types surviving solely on their wits and whatever knowledge they have picked up after years of voracious reading. Autodidacts at heart, Hustlers and Sharks know a great deal about the subjects that interest them (Military History, the early days of micro-computing), but very little about current events and what particular day this is.

Psychological Profile: Given their age in DCT ("Dick Clark Time", see above), Hustlers and Sharks spent their youth in a drugged haze criss-crossing America and the Far East before suddenly "getting serious" around 1979 and turning into the same "Materialistic, Society Pigs" they were supposedly rebelling against. NOTE: Although nothing is conclusive at this moment, the NetSlaves Research Institute has uncovered evidence which suggests that the transformation experienced by Hustlers and Sharks was caused by the mind-control drug GWTP, ("Get with the Program", a substance originally tested in Vietnam), which the U.S. Government secretly added to the chemical compound of polyester (Oliver Stone: Polyester, as if you could ever forget, was a synthetic fabric popular in the day and it began its comeback around the dawn of the Web. Coincidence? Hardly.).

Career Aspirations: To be cloned.
 

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