This, sir, is the root of the problem...

A cowboy named Bud was overseeing his herd in a remote pasture in Montana, when suddenly a brand-new BMW drove up 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 can 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 is obviously out of place, looks at his peaceful herd, then calmly answers, "Sure, why not?"

The young man parks his car, whips out his Dell® notebook, connects it to his Cingular RAZR V3® cell phone, and surfs to a NASA page on the Web, where he calls up a GPS satellite to get his exact location which he feeds to another NASA satellite, which scans the area with ultra-high-resolution photography.


He then opens the high-res 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 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 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 looks on with amusement as the young man selects one of his animals & stuffs it into the trunk of his BMW.

Bud says to the young man, "Hey, if I tell you what your business is, will you give me back my calf?"

The young man thinks for a second, "Okay, why not?"

"You're a U.S. Congressman," Bud says.

"Wow! You're right," says the young man, "but how did you guess?"

"Easy," answered the cowboy. "You showed up, though nobody called you; wantin' 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 you're smarter than me; and you don't know a thing about how average people make a living - or about cows, for that matter. . .



This, sir, is a herd of sheep.

Now give me back my dog."

~~~