A Montana cowboy was watching 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 looked at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looked at his
peacefully grazing herd and calmly
answered,"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 Congressman for the U. S. 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.