An old station hand named Billy was overseeing his stock 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 Bryony 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 animals 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 spreadsheet 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 animals, then, since you won it fair and square.” says Billy.
He watches the smartly dressed yuppie select one of the animals and looks on ...