Sunday, February 9, 2014

The Herd

A cowboy named Bud was overseeing his herd in a remote mountainous pasture in California when suddenly a brand-new BMW drove up out of a cloud of dust towards... him.

The driver, a man in a fancy suit and 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?"

Bud looks at the man, then looks at his peacefully grazing herd and calmly answers, "Sure, Why not?"

The man parks his car, whips out his smart phone surfs the web 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 smart phone 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 i phone and, after a few minutes, receives a response.

Finally, he prints out a full-color, 150-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturized apple Laser-jet 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 Bud.

He watches the guy select one of the animals and looks on amused as he stuffs it into the trunk of his car.

Then the Cowboy 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 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!" 


[Author Unknown]



Image: Steve Devenyns

When pride cometh, then cometh shame: but with the lowly is wisdom. Proverbs 11:2