A Cowboy Named Ben

A cowboy

named Ben was overseeing his herd in a remote

mountainous pasture

in California 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?"



Ben 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 Ben.



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 Ben 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 Democratic Congressman for the U.S.

Government", says Ben.



"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 you are than I;

and you don't know

shit 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.

H/T Terry