A Montana rancher was overseeing his herd in a remote mountainous pasture
when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced out of a dust cloud towards him.
The driver, a young man in a Bryony 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 Cingular RAZR V3 cell phone, and 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 Excel
spreadsheet with e-mail 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 1,586 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 Congressman for the U.S.Government," 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. You tried to show me how much smarter than me you
are; and you don't know a thing about cows, this is a herd of sheep. "Now
give me back my dog." Laughing
