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A cowboy named Bud was overseeing his herd in a
remote mountainous pasture in Alberta
When suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced toward
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
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?"
Bud 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
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 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-color, 150-page
report on his hi-tech,miniaturized 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 Bud.
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 Bud 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 cabinet minister from Ottawa , says
Bud.
"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 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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