Efficiency

An adage occured to me after work this morning. Once there was a farmer who had some sort of four-legged beast which fell into a well. Maybe it was a cow. Never mind that a cow wouldn't really fit into a well. A cow fell into this farmer's well. The farmer, naturally, couldn't get the cow outta the well seeing as the cow was too big to have realistically fit into the well in the first place. Maybe it was a donkey. Doesn't matter. At any rate, the farmer mourned the loss of the cow, or donkey, or maybe sheep, but decided that rather than shoot it, the humane thing to do would be to bury it. So the farmer shovelled dirt on the creature. And shovelled. And shovelled. And shovelled. Unbeknownst to the daft farmer, however, each time he hucked dirt on the cow, or whatever, it just shook it off, trampled it down, and cleverly found itself millimeters higher than it was theretofore. The farmer and the cow continued their respective efforts until-- Lo and behold-- the cow [maybe i'll be p.c. and cycle through the candidates] the donkey was free. What struck me as funny was that the moral of the story came from the sheep's p.o.v. ---something to the effect that if life finds you in a hole and starts shovelling dirt on you, keep stamping. That's just idiotic. Why not if you've shovelled 15 cubic yards of dirt and you still haven't covered the [what're we at now?] cow, maybe you should consider renting a backhoe.