A Con job by any other name

still smells the same.

This old joke has been recently revived and tweaked.


An Alberta cowgirl named Maisey was overseeing her large herd in a remote mountainous pasture, when a brand-new Land Rover advanced toward her out of a cloud of dust.

The driver, a man in a Tom Ford suit, Fry boots, Oakley sunglasses, Rolex watch and Ralph Lauren tie, leaned out the window and shouted to the cowgirl, "If I tell you exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd, will you give me a calf?"

Maisey looked at the man, then looked at her peacefully grazing herd and calmly answered, "Sure, why not?

The driver parked his car, whipped out his laptop, plugged it into his cell phone, and surfed to a NATO page on the Internet, where he called up a GPS satellite to get an exact fix on his location which he then fed to another NATO satellite that scanned the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo. The guy 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 Blackberry that the image has been processed and the data stored. He then accessed an MS-SQL database through an ODBC connected Excel spreadsheet and, after a few minutes, received a response. Finally, he printed out a full-color report on his hi-tech, miniaturized HP LaserJet printer, turned to the cowgirl and said, "You have exactly 1,586 animals.

"That's right. Well, I guess you can take one of my calves," said Maisey with amusement, then watched as the man took one and shoved it in the back seat of his car.

Then Maisey said to the guy, "Hey, if I can tell you exactly what your line of business is, will you give me back my calf? " He thought about it for a second and then said, "Sure, why not?"

"You're a Conservative politician", said Maisey.

"Wow! That's correct," says the man, "but how did you guess that?"

"No guessing required." answered the cowgirl. "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 used millions of dollars 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, by the way."

"Now give me back my dog."