A West Texas cowboy was herding his cows 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, Gucchi shoes, Ray Ban sunglasses and a 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 where he gets 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 E-mail 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,” answers 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 … Now, give me back my dog.”