The Cowboy and the Yuppie

A cowboy named Bud was overseeing his herd in eastern Oklahoma 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 looked at the man, obviously a yuppie, then 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 surfedto 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 had been processed and the data stored. He then accessed an 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, 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 Bud.

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

Then Bud 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 Bud.

"Wow! That's correct," said the yuppie, "but how did you guess that?"

"No guessing required." answered the cowboy. "You showed up here though nobody called you. You want to get paid for an answer I already knew, to a question I never asked. You used millions 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!