An old station hand named Billy was overseeing his herd in a remote pasture in the outback when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced toward him out of a cloud of dust.
The driver, a young man looking smick in the latest designer clothes, leaned out the window and asked the old man, "If I tell you exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd, will you give me a calf?"
Billy looks at the young 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 Cingular RAZR V3 cell 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.
Within seconds, he’s got an email on his Palm Pilot that the image has been processed telling him exactly how many head there are in the paddock.
"You have exactly 1,586 cows and calves" he tells the farmer.
"That's right. Well, you'll be helpin yourself to one of me calves, then, since you won it fair en square." says Billy.
He watches the smartly dressed yuppie select one of the animals and looks on with amusement as the man gingerly picks it up & stuffs it into the boot of his car.
As the yuppie is carefully brushing the dust & hair off his suit, Billy says, "Hey, if I can tell you exactly what work you do & where you come from, will you give me back my calf?"
The yuppie thinks about it for a second, wonderingwhat this wrinkled up dirt encrusted uneducated old man could possibly know? He grins and then says, "Okay, old fella, why not? I'm a believer in fair play."
"You're a politician & you work in Canberra." says the old timer.
"Wow! That's correct," says the yuppie, "but, tell me how on earth did you guess that?"
"No guessing required." answered Billy "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.
