A cowboy named Bud was overseeing his herd in a remote mountainous
pasture in Montana 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 looks at the man, who obviously is 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 seconds, he receives an email on his Palm Pilot® that the image has
been processed and the data stored. He then accesses an 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, 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 with
amusement 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 used millions of 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.
AND THAT FOLKS IS WHAT THE PROBLEM IS ALL ABOUT.
