An old cowboy named Dick was overseeing his herd in a remote mountainous pasture in Colorado, 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, RayBan sunglasses and YSL tie, leans out the window and asks the old cowboy, ‘If I tell you exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd, Will you give me a calf?’
Dick 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 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 an 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-color, 150-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturized HP LaserJet printer and finally turns to the cowboy 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 old cowboy. 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 Dick 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 Congressman for the U.S Government’, says Dick.
Wow! That’s correct,’ says the yuppie, ‘but how did you guess that?’
‘No guessing required.’ answered the old cowboy. ‘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 tried to show me how much smarter you are than I am, and yet, you don’t know a thing about cows…this is a herd of sheep. …
Now give me back my dog.
Thanks Anne
thats the way it is
mm, pretty much. i was the technical representative accompanying some people from our law and policy department for an “industry event” in washington (essentially, a lobbyist event. think mini convention, big room with different members of the consortium, maybe 20 total, with booths showing that particular companies Internet related technologies, etc)
the level of ignorance regarding anything technology related was astounding. mostly it consisted of staffers of various representatives or senators listening for 30 seconds to something you said, them cutting you off and regurgitating it back to you in a way that was completely wrong, you politely trying to let them know, no, you aren’t understanding how it works… blank stare, pause, nod, they move on… no idea what you just told them. I do presentations to business customers all the time, technical and non technical, i speak to the audience, never had to dumb it down as far as I did when I was in washington, and even then, they didn’t get it. and this is including staffers, who are advising the elected representatives.
the actual representatives I did meet, i would highly suspect that they were dictating email to a staffer, and reading email someone printed out for them (not kidding). I did get to hear vint cerf speak however, which was kind of cool.
This sounds just like a joke my dad always tells me, only it was a blonde.
except… it’s a FLOCK of sheep, not a herd…
/facepalm