Joke of our times

A cowboy named Bud was overseeing his herd in a remote mountain pasture in Montana when suddenly a brand new BMW sped toward him. The driver, a young man in a Brioni suit, Gucci shoes and RayBan sunglasses, leaned out the window and asked, "If I tell you exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd, will you give me a calf?" The cowboy answers, "Sure, why not?"

The yuppie whips out his Dell notebook computer, connects it to his Cingular RAZR V3 cell phone and surfs to the NASA website where he calls up a GPS satellite to get a fix on his location, which he feeds to another NASA satellite that provides an ultra-high-resolution photo. He opens the photo in Adobe Photoshop and exports it to an image-processing facility in Germany. Within seconds, he receives an email on his Palm Pilot stating the image has been processed and the data stored.

He accesses an MS-SQL database through an ODBC-connected Excel spreadsheet on his blackberry and receives a response. Finally, he prints out a full color, 150-page report on his 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 an animal and stuff it into the trunk of his

car. Then he says to the young man. "Hey, if I tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my calf?"

The young man says, "Okay, why not?"

"You're a member of the U.S. Congress," says Bud.

"Wow! That's correct," says the yuppie. "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 of equipment bought with taxpayers' money to show me how much smarter you are than me; and you don't know a thing about how ordinary people make a living. And you most certainly do not know anything about cows and calves. This is a herd of sheep. Now give me back my dog."