COWBOY

A cowboy was herding his cows 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 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 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 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...

Now give me back my dog."