A Cumbrian farmer was overseeing his herd in a remote mountainous pasture when suddenly a brand-new BMW accelerated towards him.
The driver, a young man in a Brioni suit, Gucci shoes, Ray Ban Sunglasses and Yves St Laurent tie, leans out the window and asks the farmer, 'If I tell you exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd, Will you give me a calf?' The farmer 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 RAZR V3 cell phone, and 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 e-mail 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 Spread- sheet with email on his Blackberry and, after a few minutes, receives a response. Finally he prints out a full-colour, 150-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturized HP LaserJet printer and finally turns to the farmer and says, 'You have exactly 1,586 cows and calves.' 'That's right. Well, I guess you can take one of my calves,' says the farmer. He watches the young man select one of the animals and looks on amused as the young man stuffs it into the boot of his car. Then the farmer says to the young man, '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 working for DEFRA', says the farmer. 'Hey! You're right,' says the yuppie, 'but how did you guess that?' 'I didn't need to guess.' answered the farmer. 'You showed up here even though nobody called you and 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 flock of sheep. Now, give me back my dog!' DaveD [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
