A Marine named Bud
A Marine named Bud was overseeing his platoon in a remote mountainous pasture in Iraq when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced toward him out of a cloud of dust.
The driver, a young man in a Brioni® suit, Gucci® shoes, RayBan® sunglasses and YSL® tie, leaned out the window and asked the cowboy, "If I tell you exactly how many weapons and rounds you have in your platoon, will you give me a personal escort?"
Bud looks at the man, who obviously is a yuppie, then looks at his peacefully platoon and calmly answers, "Sure, why not?"
The yuppie 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 and the data stored. 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 the cowboy and says, "You have exactly 1500 weapons and 5200 rounds"!
"That's right. Well, I guess you can take one of my men as an escort ," says Bud.
He watches the young man select one of the men and looks on with amusement as the young man shows him to the front seat of his car.
Then Bud says to the young man, "Hey, if I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my man?"
The young man thinks about it for a second and then says, "Okay, why not?"
"You're a Admiral in the U.S. Navy", says Bud.
"Wow! That's correct," says the yuppie, "but how did you guess that?"
"No guessing required." answered the Marine. "You showed up here 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 dollars worth of equipment trying to show me how much smarter than me you are; and you don't know a thing about how service men make a living - or about Marines, for that matter. Because this is an R&R camp!
Now give me back my man.
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