Being a Shropshire lad and not having much respect for ‘shiney arses’ I nearly fell off my chair laughing when I received this. So close to the truth, it’s scary!
A farmer named Bill was overseeing his herd in a rural part of Shropshire when suddenly a brand-new Audi advanced toward him out of a cloud of dust…
The driver, a young man in a Armani suit, Gucci shoes, RayBan sunglasses, Rolex watch and YSL tie, leaned out the window and asked the farmer, "If I tell you exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd, will you give me a calf?"
Bill looks at the man, then looks at his peacefully grazing herd and calmly answers, "Sure, why not?"
The man 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 IPad telling him 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 Ipad 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 the farmer and says,
“You have exactly 1,586 cows and calves.”
“That’s right. Well, I guess you can take one of my calves,” says Bill…
He watches the young man select one of the animals and looks on with amusement as the young man stuffs it into the boot of his car.
Then Bill says to the young man,
"Hey, if I can tell you exactly who and what you are and 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 graduate who has never had a job outside of the civil service and you work for a government department in London”, says Bill.
“Wow! That’s correct,” says the man, “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 pounds 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.
brilliant! and so true whether talking about the UK or France!
My friend has a small herd of Dexters and once when she spoke to DEFRA, they did not know that Dexters were cattle.