A cowboy named Bud was overseeing his herd in a remote mountainous pasture
in California when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced toward him in a cloud
of dust.
The driver, a young man in a Brioni suit, Gucci shoes, RayBan sunglasses and Yves
St. Laurent tie, leaned out the window and asked 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 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 seconds, he receives an email on his Palm Pilot that the image has been processed
and the data stored. He then accesses an 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, 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 with amusement as the
young man stuffs it into the trunk of his car.
Then Bud 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 US 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 used millions of dollars worth of equipment trying to show me how much smarter than
me you are; and you don’t know a thing about how working people make a living – or about
cows, for that matter. This is a herd of sheep."
A second or two passed when he added: "Now give me back my dog."
NCR ~ Friday Humor... 1:32 AM, EDT 
