FARMING IN ENGLAND

This is quite amusing, and hopefully will appeal to any farmers out there in blogland!

A farmer named Sid was overseeing his stock in a remote
moorland pasture in North Yorkshire when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced
toward him out of a cloud of dust.

The driver, a young man in a Brioni suit, Gucci shoes,
RayBan sunglasses 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?"

Sid looks at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looks at his
peacefully grazing stock 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
NASApage 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 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, 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 Sid.

He watches the young man select one of the animals and looks
on with amusement as the young man stuffs it into the back of his car.

Then Sid 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 a Member of Parliament for our Government", says
Sid.

"Wow! That's correct," says the yuppie, "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!