A cowboy named Mzokoto was overseeing his herd in a remote mountainous pasture in Mphompha when suddenly a brand-new BMW 6 Series Coupe 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 of the window and says to the cowboy, "If I tell you exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd, will you give me a calf?" Mzokoto 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. He feeds this 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 turns to the cowboy and says, "You have exactly 1,586 cows and calves." "That's right," says Mzokoto. "Well, I guess you can take one of my calves." 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 Mzokoto 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 an IT Consultant", says Mzokoto. "Wow! That's correct," says the yuppie, "but how did you guess that?" "No guessing required," 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. 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."
