The Cowboy

A West Texas cowboy was herding 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 AT&T 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 1586 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 consultant for the 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; and you don't know anything about my
business........ Now give me back my dog