Charles Gibb’s excellent article, Learning from Lizzie, put me in mind of the story about the Alberta cowboy:
Whilst overseeing his herd in a remote mountain pasture, a cowboy sees a brand new BMW advancing out of a cloud of dust towards him. The driver, a young man in an Armani suit, Gucci shoes, Ray Ban sunglasses and an Yves Saint Laurent tie, leans out the window and says to the cowboy: ‘If I tell you how many cows and calves you’ve got in your herd, will you give me a calf?’
The cowboy looks at the young man, then looks at his peacefully grazing herd and calmly answers: ‘Sure, why not?’
The yuppie millennial parks his car, whips out his MacBook Air, connects to his Motorola RAZR 2020 cell phone, surfs to a NASA page on the internet, and calls up a GPS Satnav system to get an exact fix on his location, which he then feeds to another NASA satellite, which scans the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo.
The young man then opens the digital photo in his DxO Elite system and exports it to an image processing facility in Hamburg Germany. Within seconds, he retrieves an email on his Huawei P Smart 2021 indicating that the image has been processed and the data stored. He then accesses a MS-SQL database through an ODCB-connected Excel spreadsheet with email through his P Smart’s octa-core Kirin 710A processor and, after a few minutes, receives a response. Finally, he prints out a full-colour, 150-page report on his high-tech, miniaturised HP LaserJet printer and turns to the cowboy and says: ‘You have exactly 1,586 cows and calves’.
‘That’s right,’ says the cowboy. ‘I guess you can take one of my calves.’ He watches the young man select one of the animals and looks on in amusement as the young man stuffs it into the trunk of his car.
Then, the cowboy 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 work for the Canadian Government,’ says the cowboy.
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‘Wow! That’s correct,’ says the young man, ‘but how did you guess that?’
‘No guessing required,’ answered the cowboy. ‘You showed up here, even though nobody called you; you want to get paid for telling me something I already know, in answer 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.’
Michael Elcock
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