Tales from the spam folder: the whiff of your reward

This is how the woman's spouse manufactured your ex an offer your woman would not refuse * putting up testimonials along with knowing goods and concepts on the internet. With a keen eyesight for fine detail and quality, Mrs. McKenzie had been waiting for such an possibility to come by.she was a typical with the on-line web site Howtowintojudge. Soon after shelling out a $5 while registration service fees, she'd compose quite a few critiques in merchandise the girl bought, coming from electric kitchen appliances in order to stylish purses as well as bags. To gauge items or to assess any goods or suggestions, there was clearly no one far better inside neighborhood than Mrs. McKenzie. Among the on the web people also, she grew to become well-known on her behalf type of product reviews, which could supply 'how to' judge items suggestions and various other range of entertaining details. These kind of actually livened in the dull ambience regarding product critiques. However she failed to attention on the section which promoted prizes to be given in the market to people who might write the top testimonials and also evaluating product guidelines, the particular whiff of your reward did not allow her to passion decline.


By Anonymous on The Seventies at 7:03 AM



Mrs. McKenzie was taut as an acrobat's wire. The box was sitting by her foot, open so she could see the contents, but the girl was just prattling on about her boyfriend, about her classes, about the weather. She would not shut up. But then Mrs. McKenzie wouldn't have cared if the girl kept talking until she passed out from lack of oxygen if she'd just do it from the next room.

And then, as if by magic: "Excuse me, I'll be right back," the young woman said, and slipped down the hallway to the bathroom. "I'll only be a moment," she called, "make yourself at home."

She wasn't even entirely out of view when Mrs. McKenzie was tearing open her purse and extracting the precious slips of paper. She knew the young couple next door ordered a lot of things from Amazon, but not what kinds of things they ordered; she was distressed to realize that she mostly had book and DVD reviews, and the box near her feet contained a lot of kitchenware. One of the boxes the girl had ordered was for a silver kettle; "Silver, grey, same thing," Mrs. McKenzie muttered, and pushed her review of Fifty Shades Of Grey through the narrow crack between the lid and the side of the box, on one side of the clear tape holding it closed. There was a knife set that had been advertised in O and Ellis Avery's The Last Nude was an Oprah Book Club selection, so that was close enough, too. Uncertain of what to do about the potholder and being left with a choice between a review of a Jonathan Franzen novel she hadn't finished and the Arcade Fire album she'd only listened to the free online samples from, Mrs. McKenzie picked Arcade Fire and tucked Franzen and a highly speculative rave for the Panasonic Men's 4-Blade Multi-Flex Wet/Dry Electric Shaver she'd merely examined in a local Target back into her purse.

The reviews, she knew, were brilliant. True, her objective evaluations of the things she reviewed had been limited by her unfamiliarity, but the best thing about the Internet had to be the way it validated opinions. If nobody online had to know anything about anything before commenting on anything, Mrs. McKenzie didn't see why she couldn't apply the principle to real life, and it had been incredibly liberating.

Why, just the other day she'd enthusiastically endorsed a new sushi restaurant in spite of the fact she not only had never dined there, nor had she ever had sushi, but in point of fact, seafood gave her hives and she was once hospitalized by a poached salmon in a light cream sauce; nevertheless, she impressed the Tuppences down the street with her account of how the chief sushi chef, a half-Japanese-half-Puerto Rican Iron Chef named Juan Hokaido who proudly chopped fish shirtless so he could display his Yakuza tattoos (a detail she'd read about in a spy thriller, the review of which was now wrapped around a loose spatula in the Amazon box at her feet). Juan Hokaido, Mrs. McKenzie told the Tuppences, took a break to come over to the table she and Mr. McKenzie shared and regale them with tales of growing up in the "srums of Alecibo" until he crawled inside the landing gear of a departing cargo plane headed to Paris, where he studied with the master French Chef C'est Le Bon for five years until he decided to go to his father's homeland and learn the art of sushi; Mrs. Tuppence interrupted, wide-eyed, to ask if that's when Mr. Hokaido joined the Yakuza, and Mrs. McKenzie, a mistress of improvisation, said, "No, he was in the Puerto Rican Yakuza, that was part of why he fled the country. Anyway, you just have to try the trout rolls when you go, they're absolutely scrumptious."

The young woman was spending an awful lot of time in the bathroom, Mrs. McKenzie thought. She could have taken her time assigning the reviews, which the woman would later find when she finished unpacking, like fortune cookie fortunes with every item. Mrs. McKenzie had been in a panic that she would be caught messing with the Amazon parcel, but now she realized she could have taken forever. She saw in near retrospect that she probably even would have had time to actually jot down quick reviews of all the items the young woman had bought for her kitchen, instead of just assigning through a mix of random chance and free association the reviews she had in her purse. Well: she did make a quick list of things the woman bought this time, and hoped she would catch the neighbor ordering from Amazon again, soon, and then she could make an excuse to visit and slip the reviews from this shipment into the next delivery.

Mrs. McKenzie stood from the couch and stretched her legs. If this was how long the woman was going to take in the bathroom, perhaps Mrs. McKenzie had time to go in the woman's bedroom and smell her things. This wasn't exactly a "fetish", or Mrs. McKenzie would have denied it was; if you caught her doing it, she would have told you she just like seeing how things smelled. She hardly ever smelled anyone's underwear (well, panties, anyway; she often sniffed brassieres), and this conclusively proved there was nothing sexual in what she did (even if she did feel a little aroused while she was doing it; not that she ever would have admitted that). A main thing was just how rewarding it felt to know what kind of detergents people used to wash their clothes, and that helped with reviews. Some detergents were just useless for getting rid of stains and smells, she'd found.

"What in God's name are you doing?!" Mrs. McKenzie snapped her eyes open and looked at the bedroom door. It took her a moment to recall she was in somebody else's house, and the occupant happened to be the young woman she'd come to give reviews to. Mrs. McKenzie had her face in a pair of sweatpants, green with grass stains and hopefully unwashed--if it had been through the laundry already, Mrs. McKenzie definitely had some product recommendations for this young lady and needed to know what she was using currently, so she could give it a lacerating evaluation the next time the subject (or any subject even tangentially related) came up. Mrs. McKenzie had been lost, though, in a reverie of sweat and fresh-mown grass and something pungent that made her heart beat (in a completely non-sexual way, of course).

"Pardon?" said Mrs. McKenzie. It was muffled by the balled-up sweatpants clutched to her face.

"Get out! Get out! Get out!" the young woman screamed. It took a while for Mrs. McKenzie to process that she was being asked to leave. There was a flash of hope when the woman stopped her at the door, but it turned out she just wanted her sweatpants back. "What do you use?" Mrs. McKenzie said, slurred, but the door was slammed in her face.

Mrs. McKenzie stood on the porch. She suddenly felt very tired and old, a sagging grey-and-pink thing living out a pantomime. Nobody really cared what she thought about anything, she realized, and now this young woman probably wouldn't even pretend. And then, Mrs. McKenzie flushed bright red and realized with some mortification what had just happened, and how the young woman probably misunderstood everything. Mrs. McKenzie was about to get her back to the door so she could explain that she was just interested in how the woman washed her clothes, but her hand stopped just short of the knocker, fingers not-quite-grazing the brass, and realized it would be a futile gesture. The woman would never believe her.

Mrs. McKenzie walked out to the street. The day was too bright; she squinted. Mr. McKenzie wouldn't be home for hours. When he retired, she thought he would be home more, but that hadn't turned out as she expected; she realized: he didn't care what she thought about anything, either. She wanted to just melt into the sidewalk, like an ice cream cone.

Ice cream! There was a Baskin-Robbins around the corner you could walk to, and she hadn't been in there in years! Did they still have thirty-one flavors?

She wouldn't even have to try all of them to write her evaluations. Just the pistachio. And when the young woman found the reviews in her mailbox next morning--Mrs. McKenzie was sure everything would be alright.





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