A peasant was overseeing his herd of animals in the last familyfarm in Singapore
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, Ray Ban sunglasses and YSL tie,
leans out the window and asks the peasant,
"If I tell you exactly how many sows and piglets you have in your herd,
Will you give me a piglet?"
The peasant 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 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 a 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 peasant and says,
"You have exactly 986 pigs and piglets."
"That's right. Well, I guess you can take one of my piglets," says the peasant.
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 the peasant says to the young man,
"Hey, if I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my piglet?"
The young man thinks about it for a second and then says,
"Okay, why not?"
"You're a MP for the PAP", says the peasant.
"Wow! That's correct," says the yuppie, "but how did you guess that?"
"No guessing required" answered the peasant.
"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 than me you are;
and you don't know a thing about pigs...
this is a herd of goats. . . .
Now give me back my dog .