The driver, a well-groomed man in a Brioni suit, Gucci shoes, RayBan sunglasses and YSL tie, leans out the window and asks the old cowboy, "If I tell you exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd, will you give me a calf?"
The rancher looks at the man, obviously some sort of an indoor yuppie, then looks at his peacefully grazing herd and wanting to see how such a thing would be attempted, 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 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 and finally turns to the rancher and says, 'You have exactly 1,586 cows and calves.'
'That's down right amazing son. Well, I guess you can take one of my calves,' says the old 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 rancher says to the young man, “How would you like two calves? If I can tell you exactly what your business is, I get my calf back, but if I fail, I’ll give you another calf.”
The man in the suit thinks about it for a second and then says, 'Okay, why not?'
'You're a United States Congressman’, says the rancher.
'Wow! That's correct,' says the sharp dressed man, 'but how did you guess that?'
'No guessing required.' answered the old 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 you are than I am, and yet, you don't know a thing about cows…this is a herd of sheep.’
“Now give me back my dog before he smothers in your trunk.”