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 hishi-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 of my calves," 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 me back my calf?"
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.