The Answer You're Not Looking For
All in A Day's Work
A cowboy was herding his herd in a remote pasture when
suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced out of a dust cloud
towards him. The driver, a young man in a Brioni
suit, Gucci shoes, Ray Ban sunglasses and YSL 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?"
The cowboy looks at the man, obviously 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 AT&T cell phone, surfs to
a NASA page on the Internet, where he calls up a GPS
satellite navigation system 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 a MS-SQL database through an ODBC
connected Excel spreadsheet with hundreds of complex
formulas. He uploads all of this data via an 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
cowboy and says, "You have exactly
1586 cows and calves."
"That's right. Well, I guess you can take one of my
calves," says
the 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 cowboy 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 consultant systems analyst.." says the
cowboy.
"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, and you don't know anything
about my business."
"Now, give me back my dog".
