A COWBOY NAMED BUD

A cowboy named Bud 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, Ray Ban 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-colour,

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 Congressman for the

U..S. Government", 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.