A West Texas cowboy was herding his herd 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, 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 AT&T 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 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, so I guess you can take one of my calves," says the
cowboy.
He then 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 consultant for the National Democratic Party, 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 cattle... now give me back my dog."
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