Fri, Aug 3, 2007

The cowboy looked at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looked at his peacefully grazing herd and calmly answered, "Sure, why not?"

The yuppie parked his car, whipped out his Dell notebook computer, connected it to his Cingular RAZR V3 cell phone, and surfs to a NASA page on the Internet, where he called up a GPS satellite to get an exact fix on his location which he then fed to another NASA satellite that scanned the area in an ultra-high resolution photo. The young man then opened the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop and exported it to an image processing facility in Hamburg, Germany . Within seconds, he received an email on his Palm Pilot that the image has been processed and the data stored. He then accessed a MS-SQL database through an ODBC connected Excel spreadsheet with email on his Blackberry and, after a few minutes, received a response. Finally, he printed out a full-color, 150-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturized HP LaserJet printer and finally turned to the cowboy and said, "You have exactly 1,586 cows and calves."

"That's right. Well, I guess you can take one of my calves," said the cowboy.

He watched the young man select one of the animals and looked on amused as the young man stuffed it into the trunk of his car.

Then the cowboy said 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 thought about it for a second and then said, "Okay, why not?"

"You're a Congressman for the U.S. Government", said the cowboy.

"Wow! That's correct," said 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."