A farmer is overseeing his herd when suddenly a brand-new car appears out of a cloud of dust and starts advancing towards him.
The driver, a young man in a suit, 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 computer, connects it to his mobile phone, gets on the Internet, where he calls up a GPS satellite to get an exact fix on his location which he then feeds to another satellite that scans the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo.
The young man then opens the digital photo on his computer and exports it to an image processing facility in Hamburg, Germany. Within seconds, he receives an email that the image has been processed and the data stored.
He then accesses a database through an Excel spreadsheet with email on his phone and, after a few minutes, receives a response. Finally, he prints out a full colour, 150-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturised printer. He turns to the farmer and says: “You have exactly 1,586 cows and calves.”
“That’s right,” says the farmer. “Well, I guess you can take one of my calves.”
He watches the young man select one of the animals and looks on with amusement as the he 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’re a politician,” 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 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.”
One friend said: “I’m betting on a horse that is 20 to one and I can’t lose.”
“What do you mean ‘you can’t lose’?” the other friend asked.
“I can’t lose, the horse is starting at 20 to one and the race doesn’t start till one.”