It’s pretty apparent from the outset that Betty isn’t
just trying to provide fellow shoppers with an honest
judgement of a product--she’s reaching out, leaving
bits of her life scattered across the site.
Her reviews left me with a strange feeling: part
empathy, part amusement, coupled with a nearunhealthy fascination with this old woman’s life. I
was engrossed by her opinion of the Cubii Under
Desk Eliptical Machine with 8 Resistance Levels in
Noir, her thoughts on a 48 pack of Prismacolor
Premier Soft Core Colored Pencils; I ate up her take
on tablets, televisions, gift bags and cookie jars. As I
continued reading, night giving way to morning, I
began feeling wistful thinking about Betty. I sent her
reviews, almost incredulously, to a friend, asking “is
th is for real?”
As I read on, Betty transformed from a caricature of
an old person overexercising her newfound digital
mouthpiece to a real, albeit out-of-touch, human
being: part tech enthusiast, part misinformed-butpolitically-active octogenarian (she described the
Kindle edition of Bush Family Nazi History and The
Black Pope as “a fast, fact-filled read”), part sweet old
lady down the hall. Her unwavering enthusiasm for
the faceless corporations that manufacture
bathmats and badge holders is infectious. Her verve
for making her small senior apartment as efficient as
possible, attempting to improve her home, and by
extension her life, by purchasing the exact right
thing, is instantly relatable to anyone who has spent
the waning hours of an evening reading increasingly
unhelpful reviews of headphones (ahem). I couldn’t
help but feel a tiny victory at every successful
purchase Betty made--the treadmill she (and her
chihuahuas) walks on while at her standing desk to
help stave off her many health problems, the
Chromebook that snappily loads the Drudge Report
for her, the television she purchased for her
technophobe sister so she could finally stream
movies--each resonated with me in the conflictingly
satisfying way that plunking down money for
unnecessary Chinese-made goods, that opening a
box sealed with Amazon Prime tape in front of my
coworkers, unfailingly does as well. Betty and I both
love buying things. Betty just has the decency to
admit it.
b
As I spent the next few days trying to figure out why
Betty’s reviews elicited such a strong response from me,
I realized that it was more than just confronting my
arms-length relationship with consumption. It was the
knowledge that Betty the Librarian is Betty Maroscher,
an 82-year-old woman from San Antonio. Betty, like
every single other contributor to Amazon, every
anonymous avatar on every forum I’ve frequented, and
perhaps more saliently, every rando I pass on the street,
every cashier and motorist and coworker-whose-nameI-can’t-quite-remember, is just as much of a person, with
just as rich of a backstory, as I am. We all know this is the
case, just like we know that the luxuries we enjoy, the
fruit and electronics and purple mountains majesty that
we get to sprawl out on, are the products of others’
suffering. We’re cognizant of these facts, but it makes
living life a lot easier to just not think about it.
Unfortunately, this method of coping with enormity of
everyone else’s existence has the side effect of turning
everyone in my vicinity, from retail worker to Reddit
user, into empty vessels from which I glean information
and buy things. I can spend days at a time thoughtlessly
engaging in these transactional interactions with
strangers before being prodded back to cognizance by
the woman at the deli in my office building asking
about a recent trip of mine, or a bartender pouring me
my usual drink, or in this case, reading Betty’s reviews.