A cowboy named Billy was overseeing his herd in a
pasture in remote countryside one day, when suddenly a brand-new BMW drove
towards him out of a cloud of dust.
The driver, a young man in a Brioni® suit, Gucci®
shoes, RayBan® sunglasses and YSL® tie, leaned out of 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?”
Billy looks at the man, who obviously is a yuppie,
then looks at his peacefully grazing herd and calmly answers, “Sure,
why not?”
The yuppie switches his car off, whips out his
Dell® notebook computer, connects it to his Cingular RAZR V3®
phone, calls up a GPS satellite to get an exact fix on his location,
surfs to a NASA web page, where he feeds the location to another
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 received an email on his Palm
Pilot® announcing 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-colour, 150-page
report on his hi-tech, miniaturised 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 Billy.
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 Billy 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 then
says, “Okay, why not?”
"You’re a Federal politician," says
Billy.
“Wow! That’s correct,” says the yuppie, “but
how did you guess that?”
“No guessing’s 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.”
“Now give me back my dog.”
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