A Montana Cowboy Tale

A Montana Cowboy Tale

A Blaine County 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, Gucchi shoes, Ray Ban
sunglasses and a 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 where he gets 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 E-mail 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 E-mail on his Blackberry and, after a few seconds,
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," answers 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."