"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 then looks at his peacefully grazing 

herd and says, "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-color, 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 liberal democrat 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.