A farmer named Bill was overseeing his herd in a remote
mountainous pasture in Scotland 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 farmer, "If I tell you exactly how many cows and
calves you have in your herd, will you give me a calf?"
Bill 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-colour, 150-page report on
his hi-tech, miniaturized HP LaserJet printer, turns to the
farmer and says, "You have exactly 1,586 cows and calves."
"That's right. Well, I guess you can take one of my
calves," says Bill.
He watches the young man select one of the animals and
looks on with amusement as the young man stuffs it into the
boot of his car.
Then Bill 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 Member of the European Parliament", says Bill.
"Wow! That's correct," says the yuppie, "but how did you
guess that?"
"No guessing required." answered the farmer. "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 pounds 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.
