An English farmer named Sid was overseeing his stock in a moorland pasture in Yorkshire when a BMW advanced towards him out of a cloud of dust.

    The driver, a posh young man, leaned out the window and asked Sid, “If I tell you how many cows and calves you have in your herd, will you give me a calf?”

    Sid calmly answers, “Sure, why not?”

    The yuppie parks his car, whips out his laptop, connects it to his 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. He then sends the photo to an image processing facility in Hamburg.

    He then accesses a database and, after a few minutes, receives a response. Finally, he prints out a full-color, 150-page report on his printer, turns to Sid 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.

    The young man selects one of the animals and stuffs it into the back of his car. Then Sid says, “Hey, if I can tell you what your business is, will you give me back my ‘calf?’” The young man agrees.

    “You’re a member of parliament,” says Sid.

    “Wow! How did you guess that?”

    “You showed up 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 smart 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 flock of sheep. ... Now give me back my dog.”