January
12th, 2007 - Guessing Game
An
Alberta cowboy was overseeing his herd in a remote mountainous
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 Cingular RAZR V3 cell phone, and 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
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 1,586 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 member of parliament for the Canadian Government", 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. You tried to show me how much smarter
than me you
are; and you don't know a thing about cows...this is a herd of
sheep. Now
give me back my dog."
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