A Little Knowledge is a dangerous thing

 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 in a Brioni® suit, Gucci® shoes,  RayBan® sunglasses and YSL® tie, 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.         

The yuppie 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 an  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, turns to Billy and says, "You have exactly 1,586 cows and  calves."         

"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, wondering what  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.

Now give  me back my dog."

Sent by Jimmy Keir.

You may have seen this earlier, but worth repeating.