Sam the Farmer
Originally published by East Midlands Liberal Democrats
Sam, the farmer, moved his herd between the fields over a small road in a remote hilly pasture in Derbyshire. Behind a brand-new BMW was waiting impatiently.
The bored driver, a young man in a Brioni® suit, Gucci® shoes, RayBan® sunglasses and YSL® tie, leaned out the window and asked the farmer, "Want a wager? If I tell you exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd, will you give me a calf?"
Sam looks at the man, then looks at his peacefully grazing animals and calmly answers, "Sure, why not?"
The driver parks his car, whips out his Dell® notebook computer, connects it to his Cingular RAZR V3® 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. 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. 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 Sam and says, "You have exactly 1,586 cows and calves."
"That's right. Well, I guess you won the bet. You can take one of my calves," says Sam. He watches the young man selecting one of the animals and looks on with amusement as he stuffs it into his car.
Then Sam says to the young man, "Hey, fancy another bet? If I can tell you exactly what your business is will you give me back my animal?"
The young man thinks about it for a second and says, "Okay, why not?"
"You're a Member of the European Parliament", says Sam.
"Wow! That's correct," says the MEP, "but how did you guess that?"
"No guessing required." answered Sam. "You showed up here even though nobody called you; you want to get paid for an answer I already know, to a question I have never asked you. You used millions of pounds worth of equipment 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.
And the moral of the fable?
First lesson: Not all the MEP's are the same.
Some of them swing around,
Tory MEP's posh night in London at taxpayer expense
.
Some of them sleep on benches presumably after a hard night's job
UKIP MEPs caught kipping on the job
and some of them work really hard for their constituents.
Bill Newton Dunn, East Midlands LibDem MEP