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 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 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 the 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 an IT Consultant', 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.