A cowboy named Bud was overseeing his herd¹ in a remote mountainous pasture in California 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, RayBan sunglasses and YSL tie, leans out the window and asks the cowboy, "If I tell you exactly how many cows and calves² you have in your herd, Will you give me a calf³?"

 

Bud 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 Cingular RAZR V3 cellphone, 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 Adobe⁴ Photoshop and exports it to an image processing facility in Hamburg, Germany. Within mere⁵ seconds, he receives an email on his Palm Pilot that the image has been processed and the data is stored. He then accesses a 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 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 one of the animals and looks on amused as the young man stuffs it into the trunk of his car.

 

Then the Bud 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 Congressman⁶ 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 tried to show me how much smarter than me you are; and you don't know a thing about cows...this is a herd of sheep. Now give me back my dog."

点击收听单词发音