An armed northern Arizona rancher was overseeing his herd in a remote mountainous pasture when, suddenly, a brand-new BMW emerged from a dust cloud.

The driver, a young man in a Brioni suit, Gucci shoes, Oakley sunglasses and YSL tie, leans out the window and asked, "If I tell you exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd, will you give me a calf?"

The rancher looked at the visitor, looked at his peacefully grazing herd, and then calmly answered, "Sure, why not?"

The visitor parked his car, whipped out his Dell notebook computer, connected it to his Cingular RAZR V3 cell phone, and then surfed to a NASA page on the Internet, where he called up a GPS satellite navigation system to get an exact fix on his location, which he then fed to another NASA satellite that scanned the area and delivered an ultra-high-resolution photo. The visitor then opened the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop and exported it to an image processing facility in Hamburg, Germany.

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

Finally, he printed out a full-color, 150-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturized HP LaserJet printer and, handing it to the Arizona rancher, said, "You have exactly 1,586 cows and calves."

"That's right," the Arizona rancher admitted. "I guess you can take one of my calves." He watched the visitor choose one of the animals and looked on, thoughtful and bemused, and as he stuffed it into the trunk of his Beemer.

Then the northern Arizona rancher said to the young man, "If I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my calf?"

The visitor thought about it for a moment and then calmly answered, "Sure, why not?"

"You're a US Congressman", said the Arizona rancher.

"That's correct," said the visitor, "but how did you guess?"

"No guessing required," answered the armed northern Arizona rancher. "You showed up here even though nobody called you; you wanted to be paid for an answer I already knew and to a question I never asked. You tried to show me how much smarter you were than I, but you don't know a thing about cows---this is a herd of sheep. Now, give me back my dog."