A cowboy named Bud was overseeing his herd in a remote mountainous pasture
in California 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, RayBan 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?”
Bud 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 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 mere seconds, he receives an email on his Palm Pilot that the image
has been processed and the data is stored. He then accesses a MS-SQL
database through an ODBC connected Excel spreadsheet with 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 1,586 cows and calves.”
“That’s right. Well, I guess you can take one of my calves,” says Bud.
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 Bud says to the young m an, “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 Bud.
“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.
What Others are Saying