Peasant farmers and technology

[NormanH]

A farmer is overseeing his herd in remote territory when suddenly a

brand-new BMW advances out of a dust cloud towards him. The driver, a young man

in a designer suit, Gucci shoes, Ray Ban sunglasses and YSL 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

Cingular 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 email 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 Spreadsheet 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 trunk of his car.

Then the

farmer 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 work

for the Government', says the farmer.

'Wow!

That's correct,' says the yuppie, 'but how did you guess that?'

'No

guessing required.' answered the farmer. '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 all kinds of expensive equipment that clearly somebody

else paid for, 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.'

[Will]

Thanks Norman. I liked that story [:D]