The Cowboy and The Yuppie
A cowboy was herding his herd in a remote pasture 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, Ray Ban 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?"
The cowboy 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 AT&T cell phone, surfs to a NASA page on
the Internet,
where he calls up a GPS satellite navigation system 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 hundreds of complex formulas. He uploads
all of this data
via an 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 1586 cows and calves."
"That's right. Well, I guess you can take one
of my calves, " says the
cowboy. 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 cowboy 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 consultant." says the cowboy.
"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; and you don't know
anything about my
business."
"Now give me back my dog.
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