A cowboy was working his herd in a remote pasture when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced out of a dust cloud towards him.

The driver, a young man in a Brioni suit, Gucci shoes, Ray Ban sunglasses and YSL tie, leaned out the window and asked the cowboy, “If I tell you exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd, will you give me a calf?”

The cowboy looked at the man yuppie, then at his peacefully grazing herd and calmly answered, “Sure. Why not?”

The yuppie parked his car, whipped out a Dell notebook computer, connected it to an AT&T cell phone, surfed to a NASA Internet site, called up a GPS satellite navigation system to get an exact fix on his location, which he then fed to another satellite that scanned the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo. He then opened the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop and exported it to an image processing facility in Hamburg, Germany.

Within seconds, he received an email on his Palm Pilot that the image had been processed and the data stored. He then accessed a SQL database through an ODBC connected Excel spreadsheet with hundreds of complex formula. He uploaded all of this data via an email on his Blackberry and, after a few minutes, received a response.

Finally, he printed out a full-color, 150-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturized HP LaserJet printer and turned to the cowboy saying, “You have exactly 1586 cows and calves.”

“That's right. Well, I guess you can take one of my calves,” said the cowboy.

He watched the yuppie select an animal and looked on in amusement as the young man stuffed it into the trunk of his car.

Then the cowboy said 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 thought for a second and said, “Okay, sure.”

“You're a consultant for the Kerry campaign,” said the cowboy.

“Wow! That's correct,” said the yuppie, “but how on earth did you guess that?”

“Well,” answered the cowboy, “you showed up here even though nobody called you. You wanted to get paid for an answer I already knew, to a question I never asked. And you don't know a damn thing about my business. Now let my dog out of your trunk.”