THAT FOLKS IS THE PROBLEM

Bud the Cowboy

 

A cowboy named Bud was overseeing his herd in a remote mountainous pasture in Montana 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, RayBan® 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, who obviously is a yuppie, then looks at his

peacefully grazing herd and calmly answers, "Sure, why not?"

  

The yuppie parks his car, whips out his Dell® notebook computer,

connects it to his Apple i 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 Apple ipad® 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 Galaxy S5® 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," 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 it back to me?"

 

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 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."

  

AND THAT FOLKS IS WHAT THE PROBLEM IS ALL ABOUT.