A Discerning Montana Cowboy

A Montana cowboy was overseeing his herd in a remote mountainous
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...this is a herd of sheep.

Now…give me back my dog.”

HT: My good buddy Brad R.