A old farm hand named Billy was overseeing his charges on a remote
moorland farm 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 old man,
"If I tell you exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd,
will you give me a calf?"
Billy looks at the young man, who obviously is a yuppie, then looks at
the peacefully grazing animals 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 yuppie 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 Billy and says, "You have
exactly 1,586 cows and calves."
"That's right. Well, you'll be helpin yourself to one of me calves,
then, since you won it fair en square." says Billy.
He watches the smartly dressed yuppie select one of the animals and
looks on with amusement as the man gingerly picks it up & stuffs it
into the boot of his car.
As the yuppie is carefully brushing the dust & hair
off his suit, Billy says, "Hey, if I can tell you exactly what work you
do & where you come from, will you give me back my calf?"
The yuppie thinks about it for a second, wondering what this wrinkled
up dirt encrusted uneducated old man could possibly know? He grins
and then says, "Okay, old fella, why not? I'm a believer in fair play."
"You're a politician & you work in London." says the old
timer.
"Wow! That's correct," says the yuppie, "but, tell me how on earth did
you guess that?"
"No guessing required." answered Billy "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 flock of sheep
.
Now give me back my dog."
