Cows in Alberta

A cowboy named Bud was overseeing his herd
in a remote mountainous pasture in Alberta
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, 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 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 cabinet minister from Ottawa , 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.