You are the type of person who seems to be running around in circles most of the time, in large part because you spend a lot of time running around in circles. Family and friends have no idea how many contradictory thoughts are going through your head at one time. Today, you are likely to spend a great deal of time driving to a factory outlet wanting to buy either a flower arrangement for that special day for your mother or a New York Yankees baseball cap. Be on the lookout for malfunctioning pocket calculators. You should consider shopping at stores or businesses beginning with the letter A, but do not buy any products with a serial number or product code containing the number 622088. Your preferred shopping venue is mail order catalogs. Your special symbol is the question mark (?).

As a Gray Skittery, you are ambivalent, indecisive, and uncertain. You are in a constant struggle between the forces of demand and supply, production and consumption, good and evil... and you're losing the battle. You have trouble making decisions and choosing from among the seemingly infinite number of options that you perpetually face. Your shopping experiences are inevitably confusing.

The four aggregate sectors of the macroeconomy--household, business, government, and foreign--that reflect four key macroeconomic functions and are responsible for four expenditures on gross domestic product. These four sectors are the primary "actors" on the macroeconomic stage. Macroeconomic theories then explain macroeconomic phenomena by exploring the interaction among these four sectors.

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Our pedestrian's jaunt through the economy is not, unfortunately, an unrestrained shopping spree for confectioneries, spark plug tools, and Houston, Texas. We have other important errands to run. At the moment we need to hike over to Shady Valley's exclusive provider of cable television services, the Merciless Monolithic Media Masters Cable Television Company, Inc., to inquire about a mysterious fee that appeared last month's bill.

The good news is that the Merciless Monolithic Media Masters (the 4M people) Cable office is a mere 2 miles (3 kilometers for the metrically inclined) from the Shady Valley Central Town Sprawling Hills Shopping Mall. A hop, skip, and a moderately long jump later, our excursion through the economy takes us to the front door of the 4M Cable Television Company where I hope to discover why last month's cable bill included a $3,569 charge for something called "The Vacation Channel." I didn't even know I had a vacation channel. (But, I'm sure it's a great channel, and if I don't have it, then I will certainly subscribe. Please don't disconnect me.)

Of course, because this an afternoon workday, the doors of the 4M office are locked. I can almost make out, through the expensive stained glass windows, what appears to be several Merciless Monolithic Media Masters Cable Television employees, with champaign bottles in hand, dancing on expensive mahogany desks. Let's not disturb them. As they say in the cable business, an upset worker is a disconnected customer.
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-- Thomas Watson Jr., IBM executive

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