The Cowboy

A Montana cowboy 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 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 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 Photo shop 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. 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."