A Cowboy Named Bud

A cowboy named Bud was overseeing his herd in a remote, mountainous pasture in Montana when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced out of a cloud of dust toward him.

The driver, a young man in a Brioni suit, Gucci shoes, RayBan sunglasses and a YSL tie, leans 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 looked at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looked at his peacefully grazing herd and calmly answered, “Sure, why not?”

The yuppie parked his car, whipped out his Dell notebook computer, connected it to his Singular RAZR V3 cellphone, and surfed to a NASA page on the Internet, where he called up a GPS satellite to get an exact fix on his location, which he then fed to another NASA satellite that scanned the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo.

The young man then opened the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop and exported it to an image processing facility in Hamburg, Germany.

Within seconds, he received an e-mail on his Palm Pilot that the image has been processed and the data stored. He then accessed an MS-SQL database through an ODBC connected Excel spreadsheet with email on his Blackberry and, after a few minutes, received a response.

Finally, he printed out a full-color, 150-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturized HP Laser Jet printer and turned to the cowboy and said, “You have exactly 1,586 cows and calves.”

“That’s right. Well, I guess you can take one of my calves,” Bud replied.

He watched the young man selected one of the animals and looks on amused as the young man stuffed it into the trunk of his car.

Then Bud told 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 said, “OK, why not?”

“You’re a congressman for the U.S. government,” said Bud.

“Wow! That’s correct,” said the yuppie, “but how did you guess that?”

“No guessing required,” the cowboy answered. “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. Then you tried to show me how much smarter you are than me. And you don’t know a darn thing about cows… This is a herd of sheep.

“Now give me back my dog!”