You are the type of person who could have been the inspiration for the phrase "salt of the earth". Family and friends never, never, never ask your advice about the latest fashions, and rightly so. Today, you are likely to spend a great deal of time wandering around the shopping mall looking to buy either a birthday greeting card for your uncle or a T-shirt commemorating the 2000 Presidential election. Be on the lookout for empty parking spaces that appear to be near the entrance to a store. You should consider shopping at stores or businesses beginning with the letter G, but do not buy any products with a serial number or product code containing the number 779074. Your preferred shopping venue is thrift stores. Your special symbol is the comma (,).

As a Brown Pragmatox, you are down-to-earth and practical. You are hard working and industrious. You are frugal to the point that you might even refrain from making a purchase that you really, really need. Doing so often causes problems down the road. You definitely go with function over form and substance over style.

A subset of the balance of payments current account that records the difference between the payments received for exports of services to other nations and the payments made for the imports of services from other nations. The flow of payments is for intangible services, not for physical or tangible goods. The balance on services is thus appropriately divided into services exported and services imported. Two other subsets of the current account include the balance on merchandise trade and unilateral transfers. The commonly termed balance of trade is the sum of the balance on merchandise trade and the balance on services.

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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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