A cowboy named Bud

[markem]

A cowboy named Bud was overseeing his herd in a remote mountainous
pasture in California 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, RayBan 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?'

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 mere seconds, he receives an email on his Palm Pilot that the
image has been processed and the data is 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 Bud.

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 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 Congressman for the U.S. Government', 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 tried to show me how much smarter
than me you are; and you don't know a thing about cows...this is a herd
of sheep. Now give me back my dog.