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Frank Viola | Beyond Evangelical

Frank Viola | Beyond Evangelical

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The Young Man and The Cowboy

To lighten things up a bit on the blog this week, here’s a short story that a friend sent me.

—

A cowboy named Bud was overseeing his herd in a remote mountainous pasture in California, 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, RayBan sunglasses and YSL tie, leaned out his window and asked the cowboy . . .

“If I tell you exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd, will you give me a calf?”

Bud looked at the man, obviously a yuppie, and then looked at his peacefully grazing herd. He calmly answered, “Sure, why not?”

The yuppie parks his car, whipped out his Dell notebook computer, connected it to his Cingular RAZR V3 cell phone, and surfed to a NASA  page on the Internet. He then called up a GPS satellite to get an exact fix on his location which he immediately fed to another NASA satellite that scanned the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo.

The young man then opened the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop and exported it to an image processing facility in Hamburg, Germany.

Within seconds, he received an email on his Palm Pilot saying that the image had been processed and the data stored. He then accessed a MS-SQL database through an ODBC connected Excel spreadsheet via email on his Blackberry, and after a few minutes, he received a response.

Finally, he printed out a full-color, 150-page report on his hi-Tech Miniaturized HP LaserJet printer and finally turned to the cowboy named Bud and said, “You have exactly 1,586 cows and calves.”

Bud replied: “That’s right. Well, I guess you can take one of my calves.”

Bud watched the young man select one of the animals and looked on amused as the young man stuffed it into the trunk of his car.

Then Bud said 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 thought about it for a second and said, “Okay, why not?”

“You’re a Congressman for the U.S. Government,” said Bud.

“Wow! That’s correct,” said the yuppie, “But how did you guess that?”

“No guessing required,” answered Bud. “You showed up here even though nobody called you. You wanted 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 cows . . . this is a herd of sheep.

Now give me back my dog.”

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Category: Humor

About Frank Viola

Frank Viola is a best-selling author, blogger, speaker, and consultant to authors and writers. His mission is to help serious followers of Jesus know their Lord more deeply so they can experience real transformation and make a lasting impact. To learn more about Frank and his work, go to 20 Years of Projects. To invite Frank to speak at your event, go to his Speaking Page. Due to a new problem with persistent spam that we haven’t figured out how to control, comments are closed for the present time. To contact Frank, use the “Contact” page in the top menu.

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Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Ben Simpson

    February 23, 2012 at 11:45 AM

    Thanks, Frank. I got a laugh out of this.

  2. Kalil

    February 22, 2012 at 2:32 PM

    Hilarious! Thanks for sharing.

  3. Susan Taylor

    February 22, 2012 at 1:16 PM

    Appropriate attitude, Bud. I heard a variation on this story at a clergy breakfast this morning, and I enjoyed the “whole story” much more.

    • Frank Viola

      February 22, 2012 at 1:31 PM

      What was the variation? Can you share it?

  4. Pat

    February 22, 2012 at 11:19 AM

    LOL! very funny!!!

  5. Louise

    February 22, 2012 at 10:41 AM

    I want that gift of poise that can wait to give the zinger until the fool is done impressing me!

  6. Greg

    February 22, 2012 at 9:50 AM

    So true…

    • Chad Leighfield

      February 22, 2012 at 10:27 AM

      I really enjoyed that, as well as the fact that you Americans have about as much respect for your elected representatives as we Brits do our members of parliament.

  7. Christopher Holmes

    February 22, 2012 at 8:39 AM

    Nice. Must read to my wife and friends. They will have a good laugh. I love your sense of humor, LOL.

  8. Pete

    February 22, 2012 at 2:22 AM

    Why are you trying to stuff that sheep into your computer?
    Because it needs more RAM.

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Frank Viola

Frank is a bestselling author, speaker, podcaster, and blogger. He helps serious followers of Jesus know their Lord more deeply so they can experience real transformation and make a lasting impact. His blog – frankviola.org – is regularly ranked in the top 5 of all Christian blogs on the Web and his podcast – Christ is All – has ranked #1 in Canada and #2 in the USA on Apple Podcasts. He and his conversation partners also host The Insurgence Podcast. Frank’s books have sold over 600,000 copies and they’ve been translated into many languages.

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