| 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 hundreds
of
complex formulas. He uploads all of this data via an 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 1586 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 consultant for the National Democrat 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; and you don't know anything about my
business........ Now give me back my dog." |